Week 2: Progress and Blogs

Weekly Statistics: Week 1 = 209 Visits to www.Charles-Matthews.com, daily average = 30 visits

Weekly Activity: Pinesport Divide is not available in book form yet, although I expect to receive a proof copy this week. Then, once the proof copy has received my blessing, it is full speed ahead. I am targeting the beginning of March. The book is available for the Kindle now, however sales are slow (which is another way to say I haven't sold any yet). Not to despair though; ebooks are still an emerging market and I didn't expect to see much business there anyway. I'm pessimisticly optimistic.

Even with the 48 inches of snow the Northeast was pummeled with this past week, I managed to tweak my Home Page and Bio page a few hundred times. I also found and posted the first Short Story I ever wrote.

This Week's Lesson Learned: Blogs
What exactly is a Blog? Sounds like a creature from a bad 1970's Science Fiction flick, right? In a sense, they do resemble an alien force by the way they have crawled all over the internet over the past decade. But what makes them so popular, and why are they particularly important for writers?

Blogs first emerged somewhere in the late 1990's, but didn't really explode until just the past few years. Basically, a Blog is a routine way to disseminate information. It is information put on the internet which can be entertaining, fact filled, informational, personal, or business related. Think of it as a journal online. Speaking of Science Fiction, one example of a blog would have been Captain Kirk's log. He routinely recorded reports into his recorder to capture information. Today (or 2 Centuries from now if you are still on the Enterprise), this would be considered a Blog.

Blogs are an essential tool for writers, as it is a way to get your name and work out to the public. If you've been following me (for the whole nine days my site has been up now), then you know this is a new thing for me. I'll be honest with you; at first I winced at the thought of sitting down at least once a week to write a blog - just another chore to take care of. But then I thought about it again - it's a chance for me to sit down on a regular basis to dedicate to writing and to share my experiences. I imagine it's going to be a difficult challenge drumming up new things to discuss every week, but if I'm not struggling, then I'm not growing.