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This is usually Ruth's week to post, but she's busy proofing galleys of her much-anticipated new novel The Chanel Caper. And next weekend, I'll be busy teaching THE TECH-SAVVY AUTHOR workshop. So we switched. On March 3rd, look for Ruth's post on why we like a tough, flinty heroine.

OK, let's talk editing. Editing our own work can be tedious. And painful. But it's essential. A paid editor can only do so much. We need to do most of the heavy lifting ourselves.

I've recently gone back to an old, multi-rejected project in hopes I can get my new publisher interested. Now that Boomer Lit is an up and coming genre, I'd love to get my comic Boomer novel, The Ashtrays of Avalon out there to readers.

Revisiting the old manuscripts (I had about 14 versions—tip: don't do this) I had to forget about being an artist and put on my editor's hat. It's always hard to block emotional ties to a work and imagine how a publisher might see the manuscript.

As usual, the opening chapter took the most work.

Introducing your reader to your characters and your fictional world may be the single trickiest job a novelist has. You have to present a lot of information at the same time you're enticing us to jump into the story. If you tell us too much, you’ll bore us, but if you tell us too little, you’ll confuse us.

An editor I respect a lot once told me to write my last chapter first and my first chapter last.

It sounded a little crazy, but I later realized what he meant is that it's a lot easier to get story momentum if you know where it's going—something I didn't do with this book—and your first chapter is going to need so much polishing that you shouldn't dwell on it when you're writing that first draft.

That's because when a writer is first diving into a novel, we’re not introducing the characters to a reader; we’re introducing them to ourselves.

All kinds of information about your protagonist will come up. Maybe she lives in a noisy apartment building in an ethnic neighborood of a city with a fascinating history. And her next door neighbor is a professional dominatrix. Or she feels a deep hatred for Justin Beiber. This stuff will spill out in your first chapters. Let it. That’s the fun part.

But be aware you’ll want to cut most of that information or move it to another part of the book when you edit.

It helps to remember this formula: first drafts are for the writer; revisions are for the reader.

Even if you’re not going the agent/publisher route, you need to keep your reader in mind. Self-publishers are judged, too, and reviewers and readers can be snarkier than any agent.

Here are some questions to ask yourself that should help in the revision process.

1) Do you have a Robinson Crusoe opening? That’s when your character is alone and musing. Robinson Crusoe is boring until Friday shows up. So don’t snoozify the reader with a character:

• driving alone in a car/wagon/boat
• musing while traveling on an airplane/bus/coach/spaceship
• waking up and getting ready for the day
• out on a morning jog
• looking in the mirror

Especially looking in the mirror. It’s not wrong, but it’s seriously overdone. (Yes, I started my first novel this way. I think a lot of us do, especially if we're writing romance.)

The easiest way to show your MC to your reader is to show how he interacts with the world. Two or three other characters is ideal: not too many or the reader will be overwhelmed.

2) Is your opener bogged down with physical description of the characters, especially of the police report variety? All we know about Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice is that she has “fine eyes.” We don’t have to be told height, weight or hair/eye color unless it illuminates character (see #3.) Let us know what kind of person he/she is and the reader’s imagination fills in the blanks.

Unusual characteristics like Nero Wolfe’s size, Hercule Poirot’s mustache, and Miss Marple’s age show who these characters are and make them memorable. But we don’t need to know the hair/eye thing unless the characteristic is important to the story—like Anne of Green Gables hating her hair and dying it green. (And can you believe the idiots who pictured her as a hot blonde in this new edition of the public domain book?)

3) Does your MC have a goal? Are you letting the reader know what it is? Characters need goals in each scene. But the protagonist needs one goal to rule them all—a compelling, over-arching objective for the whole book. He can’t be easily satisfied. He must need something very badly. This especially important for memoir writers: “I was born and then some stuff happened and I met some people and then I had a catastrophe but I pulled myself out of my misery and now I love life and God and multilevel marketing”—is not going to keep readers turning the pages.

A novel or memoir needs to be about one big thing, and the character has to have one big goal. Too many goals? You may have a series. Nothing wrong with that, but figure out what the goal is for this particular book.

4) Does your MC have strong emotions we can identify with in the opening scene? We don’t have to identify with the situation, but with the emotion: If the character is furious because his roommate keeps playing to As Long As You Love Me over and over—even if you’ve never heard of Justin Beiber you’ll identify with the anger, because everybody’s been angry.

5) Have you started with a POV character about to be killed? Or facing a challenge in a dream or videogame that turns out not to be real? If you get us intrigued and then say “never mind”, the reader will feel his time and sympathy have been wasted.

6) Do you introduce your MC as close to page one as possible? Don’t waste time on long weather reports or descriptions of the setting. Although that was a convention in classic novels, it feels like filler now. Modern readers want to jump into the story and get emotionally involved.

A line or two about the setting or atmospheric conditions will set the mood, but a modern reader doesn’t need the kind of long descriptions of exotic weather or far off lands that Victorians loved.  Even if we’ve never been there, we all know what London, or the Alps, or rain forests look like because we’ve seen them in films and on TV.

7) Does the chapter have the right tone and establish theme? You don't want to set up false expectations in your reader. If this is lighthearted chick lit, you don't want to start with a gruesome murder. You don't want chirpy dialogue at the beginning of your dark fantasy. If you're going to be dealing with a theme of climate change, drop in a few hints right away, like the penguins who just arrived on a Malibu beach. Or in psychological suspense, you can hint at the dark secrets of the hero's family with ominous noises coming from the basement or the locked door to the attic.

8) Does your MC come off as a Mary Sue? A Mary Sue (or Gary Stu) is the author’s idealized fantasy self—an ordinary person who always saves the day and is inexplicably the object of everyone’s affection. A Mary Sue will make your whole story phony, because a too-perfect character isn’t believable (and is seriously annoying.)

9) Do we know where we are?  If the MC is thinking or talking to someone—where is he? As I said, we don’t want a long description of the scenery or the weather, but let us know what planet we’re on.

10) Have you started with dialogue? Readers want to know who’s speaking before they’ll pay much attention to what they say.

It’s just like real life: if strangers are shouting in the hallway, it’s noise. If you recognize the shouters as your boss and that dominatrix next door—you’re all ears.

11) Have you kept backstory to a minimum in your opener? Backstory can be dribbled in later in thoughts, conversations and mini-flashbacks—AFTER you’ve got us hooked by your MC and her story.

12) Have you plunged into action before introducing the characters? The introductions can be minimal, but they have to make us feel connected enough to these people to care

Example: If you hear some stranger got hit by a car—it’s sad, but you don’t have much curiosity about it. If you hear that dominatrix got hit bu a golf cart driven by a guy who looked like your boss, you want to know when, where, how...now!

13) Is that prologue REALLY necessary?  

Sigh. I've got one in that novel I'm revising. Yup. I've got a dreaded prologue and I sent the book to my editor with it intact.

But the manuscript was also rejected more times than any sane person would want to admit. One of the biggest reasons agents gave? The prologue.

If you have a prologue and you want to go the agent route, it's best to rethink. If you're self-publishing, you can take your chances with your readers. If you're with a small press--well, my editor hasn't let me know if I can keep it yet.

Here are some reasons why agents hate prologues

• People skip them.

• The reader has to start the story twice. Just as she’s getting into the story, she’s hurled to another time or place, often with a whole new set of characters. Annoy a reader at your peril.

• When an agent or editor asks for the first chapter—or you have a preview of the book on Amazon—you’ve got a major dilemma.  Do you send the actual chapter one—where the plot starts—or that poetic prologue?

• Agents hates the prologueses, precious, yesss:

From former agent Colleen Lindsay:
“In pages that accompany queries, I have only once found an attached prologue to be necessary to the story.”

From agent Jenny Bent:
“At least 50% of prologues that I see in sample material don't work and aren't necessary. Make sure there's a real reason to use one.”  

From agent Ginger Clark:
“Prologues: I am, personally, not a fan. I think they either give away too much, or ramp up tension in a kind of "cheating" manner.”

From agent Andrea Brown:
 “Most agents hate prologues. Just make the first chapter relevant and well written.”

From agent Laurie McLean:
 “Prologues are usually a lazy way to give backstory chunks to the reader and can be handled with more finesse throughout the story. Damn the prologue, full speed ahead!”

Even usually ultra-tactful publishing guru Nathan Bransford says:
 “A prologue is 3-5 pages of introductory material that is written while the author is procrastinating from writing a more difficult section of the book.” 

Ouch.

I know you’re all wailing. But try removing the prologue. Read chapter one. Does it make sense? Could you dribble in that backstory from the prologue into the story later—while the actual plot is going on?

A prologue can sometimes be like a first draft—something for the writer, not the reader. Not the overture, but the tuning-up. Like a character sketch, a prologue usually belongs in your book journal—not the finished project.

Go ahead and write one to get your writing juices flowing. Use it to get to know your book’s basic elements. It can be mined later for character sketches, backstory and world building, but try to cut it in your final revision.

But I know. Sometimes you can't. I couldn't.

So what about you, scriveners? What do you want to read about a character first off? What makes you want to go on a journey with this character? What do you find difficult about introducing a character?


And the free tickets go to....

Random.org has spoken and the winners of two free tickets to the March 2nd TECH-SAVVY AUTHOR seminar I'm teaching with author Catherine Ryan Hyde, screenwriter/radio star Dave Congalton and a host of other tech-savvy folks are:

1) Janice Konstantinidis

2) David Schwab

Congrats, Janice and David!

Places are still available. More info in the "Opportunity Alerts" below.


Opportunity Alerts: 


1) BiblioPublishing is looking for submissions of out-of-print or new books for publication through their small press. This 25-year-old press (formerly called The Educational Publisher) is branching out from educational books to other nonfiction and selected fiction. They're especially looking for self-help and sci-fi. They provide cover design, formatting and distribution, but ask your ms. be pre-edited. They publish in print as well as all ebook formats.

2) $2000 Grand Prize. NO entry fee. Call for Entries—The Flying Elephants Short Story Prize, sponsored by "Ashes & Snow" artist Gregory Colbert. AndWeWereHungry, a new online literary magazine, seeks literary short stories for its debut issue fiction contest. THEME: "And We Were Hungry....," or "Hunger." For isn't it, to quote Ray Bradbury, hunger or "lack that gives us inspiration?"  Prize: One grand prize ($2000) + three finalists (each $1,000) + eight runner-ups. Deadline: March 31, 2013.

3) Interested in having your short fiction recorded for a weekly podcast?There’s no pay, but it’s fantastic publicity if your story is accepted by SMOKE AND MIRRORS. They broadcast about three stories a week. Spooky, dark tales preferred. No previous publication necessary. They judge on the story alone.

4) Cash prizes for flash fiction. The San Luis Obispo  NIGHTWRITERS are holding their annual 500-word story contest. Anybody from anywhere in the world is welcome to enter. Prizes are $200, $150 and $75. This is a fantastic organization that boasts a number of bestselling authors among their members, including Jay Asher, Jeff Carlson, and moi. (Well, some sell better than others :-) ) Deadline is March 31st.

5) Tech-Savvy Author Workshop: If you live on the Central Coast of California and you’re interested in learning about blogging, building platform and everything a 21st Century author needs to know, Anne will be teaching at a seminar called THE TECH SAVVY AUTHOR with Catherine Ryan Hyde, screenwriter and radio personality Dave Congalton and a whole crew of smart techie folks on March 2nd. Students get in for half price.

6) FREE BOOK!!! FREE on Amazon Feburary 24-28. Jane Austen meets Little House on the Prairie  ROXANNA BRITTON, a biographical novel about a real pioneer of the American west. The author is Shirley S. Allen, author of the bestselling mystery Academic Body and retired professor of creative writing from the University of Connecticut. (Also Anne's mom.) It's a delicious page-turner and a slice of real history based on family records and stories. Roxanna Britton was Anne's great, great, grandmother. This book is now available in e-book with a lovely new cover! This your chance to read it free.

Free! Jane Austen meets Little House on the Prairie

Are you "building platform" or just annoying people?

This week, author Mary W. Walters blogged that promoting your books on Facebook and Twitter is a total waste of time for book sales.

That's because Social Media is not for selling books. It's for making friends—friends we hope will help us in our careers sometime. It's for networking, not a direct sales tool.

Today we have some valuable advice from Mark Edwards, one of the superstar authors who made indie publishing the powerful movement it has become. He and Louise Voss made history when their self-pubbed books soared to the top of the UK bestseller lists and got them a big-money deal with HarperCollins. 

One of the secrets to their success is their savvy use of the Amazon "product description" that goes on the Amazon buy page of your book. Here's Mark's advice on how to write brilliant book descriptions of your own.

• At the RG2E: The Readers' Guide to E-Publishing talking about "bag lady syndrome" and the story behind NO PLACE LIKE HOME--leave a comment and win a FREE copy! 
• At Ruth Harris's blog talking about the evils of dieting and the size-acceptance movement that inspired FOOD OF LOVE.
• Visiting Peggy Henderson's Blog on Monday February 11th for an interview about the romantic side of her work, and and give-away of a FREE copy of the Camilla Randall Mysteries Boxed Set. 
• She's also FEATURED BLOGGER OF THE MONTH at the Writer's Knowledge Base, talking with Elizabeth S. Craig about all her new book plans. (She's planning a new book featuring the ghost of Richard III--newly released from that parking lot) 
• You can hear a radio podcast interview with Anne and Barbara M. Hodges at BLOG TALK RADIO on February 14th, Valentine's Day. She'll be talking about NO PLACE LIKE HOME and doing a reading from the book.  

First: Many thanks to Writers Digest editor Robert Lee Brewer, who put this blog in his list of "Blogs that Rock" in his BEST BLOGS FOR WRITERS TO READ IN 2013 this week.

Yes, you should do frequent Internet searches of your own name. 

I have to laugh when I see writers apologizing on their blogs for Googling themselves.

They say stuff like "I'll bet you do it too" as if they were teen boys searching for MILFs and crush fetish pix.

It’s more like apologizing for balancing your checkbook.

As social media guru Kristen Lamb says “Your name is your brand.” How could it be “vain” to find out how your brand is doing?

Publishing is a business. Businesses need to take care of their brand's image. It’s why they hire public relations people. And advertisers.

I'm going to repeat Kristen's words again: YOUR NAME IS YOUR BRAND. New writers should make that their mantra. It's why you need to put your own name (or the name you write under) prominently on your blog. Preferably in the blog's header. It's why you need an "about me" page—with contact information. YOU are your product. Not a book. Not a setting. Not a genre. You.

NOTE: If you have a really common name like Anne Allen, use your middle name or initial on everything. Otherwise you disappear onto page 57 of a Google search.

When you think of bestselling writers, what pops into your head first: "Stephen King" or "that writer from Maine"? When you think of bestselling romance, do you think of  "The Last Boyfriend" or "The Perfect Hope" or do you think "Nora Roberts"?

Stephen King, Nora Roberts, James Patterson, and Dan Brown are BRANDS. Not their genre, setting or titles. This doesn't mean "they're so vain." It means they're good business people.

You want to be a brand too. (Which means you have to use a pen name if your name actually is Stephen King or Nora Roberts.) You don't want to blog or tweet as @RomanceMomma or @PeoriaDude. Don't use a picture of a landmark, baby or the Tardis as your Twitter avatar. Don't name your blog, "Sweet Savage Surrender" or "The Rubens Code" (You can't copyright a title and chances are somebody's used it before. anyway.)

What you want to present to the world is YOU, the author.

Industry insider Porter Anderson is especially unfond of those baby-avatars. He didn't mince words when speaking of them on this week's Writing on the Ether. "When people use their (or someone else’s) childhood pictures as their avatars, it’s not cute, entertaining, funny, endearing, authentic, nor—and this is most important—informative. It’s just tedious. Would you walk around town with a picture of yourself at age five stuck on your face? No? Then why are you walking around the biggest city in history with a picture of yourself at age five stuck on your face?"

Oh, come on, you fantasized about the glamour, didn't you? When you first harbored those secret desires to be a writer, you pictured yourself in a little villa in the south of France, maybe? A woodsy cabin by a New England lake? At least an oh-so-romantically seedy flat in a major metropolitan area? 

And there were the afternoons in Paris cafes. Jetting off to tropical climes to do a little deep sea fishing or big game hunting. Or maybe you'd get to solve crimes like TV's Jessica Fletcher or Richard Castle.

Thing is—have you ever seen those TV and film novelists actually writing books? Of course not. For the same reason they don't have TV shows about watching paint dry.

As Ruth Harris shows us this week, a lot of real writers' lives are pretty boring. And living with us can be kind of a pain. But she's found a few who have some exciting tales to tell...

DANGER: Writer at Work
by Ruth Harris

Anyone who has ever lived with a writer knows it ain’t easy.

Moody? Check.

Preoccupied? Check.

Cranky, quirky, obsessive, prone to long silences and short bursts of typing? Ditto.

And those are only the subclinical descriptions.

We kill people, make them miserable, give them impossible challenges, break their hearts, subject them to rainy days and stormy nights, vicious enemies, terrible wardrobe choices and soul-shriveling bad hair days not to mention fires, floods, avalanches and tornadoes. We do nothing but cause trouble and then pile on more. We’re dangerous for sure.

But what goes on behind the scenes? Are our own lives as dramatic and crisis-ridden as our characters? Do we live on the wild side? Do we battle zombies and assassins? Are our love lives as passionate as the characters we write about? I asked a few writers to confess their quirks, their routines, their oddball habits.

Some of us (Michael and me definitely included) are—there’s no other way to put it—b-for-boring. We stick to a regular routine, sit at our computers and beaver away. We’re soooo boring we’re not even competitive about it although Vanessa Kelly, bestselling author of Regency romance, claims she and her DH, Randy—they write romantic suspense as VKSykes—are THE most boring writers on the planet.

“We both write in our offices on our computers, and I sometimes write on my Alpha Smart. The only thing I’ll sometimes do is take notes or write when we’re driving in the car somewhere – Randy is doing the driving! We will brainstorm together when we go for a walk, but that’s about it. All the quirkiness seems to go on in our heads!”

Anne R Allen says: “I’m at the keyboard at 8:30 every morning, seven days a week, with a big cup of English Breakfast tea with almond milk and Stevia. If I'm writing something with an urgent deadline, I ignore the Internet entirely. Sometimes I ignore the entire world. For long periods. I remember one time going outside after a long intense writing session and wondering what weird weather pattern was going on now--all the trees were blossoming, and here it was November. Then I realized no: my book was set in November. In the real world, it was April.”

Mark Chisnell, thriller writer extraordinaire, is much more adventuresome. He races yachts and climbed halfway up Mount Everest in sneakers(!). “I work normal hours and I have a grown-up office with a desk, book shelves, filing cabinets but I wasn't always so organized. I wrote and rewrote my first novel,THE DEFECTOR, in a multitude of strange places, but the early draft was done in the South of France. It sounds idyllic and very Graham Greene, but I had gone down there to work for a magazine that went bust. So I was trapped in a rental agreement I couldn't escape, with no job and very little money in the bank.

"I wrote the novel to make the best use of a very bad situation, but circumstances had a lot in common with the freezing garret of legend. There was no desk in the room, so I improvised by using a chest of drawers—awkward as there was no gap for the knees. It was winter and the building was designed for summer residence, with thick brickwork to keep it cool, and no heating; every hour or so I would have to go outside to warm up enough to keep my fingers mobile and typing. I remember that the only time I was truly warm in that place was in the bath. I finished the novel just as I escaped the lease and fled back to England.”

DDScott, bestselling rom-com author and founder of WG2E, doesn’t fool around with English Breakfast tea: “I do luuuvvv to write in cocktail lounges while I'm enjoying Happy Hour. I actually fill my cocktail napkins with tons of ideas then take 'em home and slip 'em into a special box just for that very thing. Then, when I need an off-the-wall, over-the-top idea, I know just where to look. :-) Martinis and other such fabulous glasses full of liquid courage make for killer muse therapy!!!”

Some, like Claude Nougat, founder of a Goodreads group devoted to Baby Boomer fiction, even break the law. “I had a light bulb placed over the bath tub, thus going against every law in Italy (apparently it's unsafe to place a bulb there!!) because I used to love to read in the tub! I did try to take notes while I was in my bathtub but I had no pen and had to get out, dripping wet and cold, to get it. I slipped on the mat coming back into the tub. I slid into the (by now tepid) water but managed to splash some water drops on the paper, making half of it unusable. I tried to write but having forgotten to take along a slate or something hard, I couldn't do it. Just a couple of miserable squiggles. So I had to hold it up against the wall to try and write. More water seeped into the paper, leaving me no place to write anything beyond three or four words.

“By then, exasperated, I got out having thoroughly forgotten what I wanted to write. Yes, I hate bathtubs!”

In addition to Claude, the law-breaker, DD, the lounge lizard, and Mark, the broke and freezing writer who had better experiences in the bathtub than Claude, Roy Street, who writes Daphne du Maurier-award winning romance, mystery/suspense and paranormal genres with his wife Alicia, also lives—and writes—dangerously.

“Alicia and I like to keep physically active while we write, taking frequent breaks for things like push-ups or jogging in place. Having been a pro dancer, Alicia keeps a portable barre in the study where she works.

“I prefer shadow boxing. When we were working on a novel that featured a boxer I decided to up the ante to deepen the ‘show-don’t-tell’ aspects. I asked my friend Aubrey, who was an ex-pro boxer, to come over and spar with me. Not only did he graciously oblige, but he knocked me out. Fortunately, it took only a handful of minutes for me to revive and, yes, return to my keyboard. Loaded with inspiration . . . and a sore jaw.”

So, Scriveners it's YOU TELL US time: What are your writing quirks? Have you ever broken the law, gotten knocked out, or frozen in the South of France? Or are you just…sorry, but I don’t know how else to say this…the b word like Vanessa, Randy, Anne and Ruth?

We have 5 Opportunity Alerts this week:

#1 Tech-Savvy Author Workshop: If you live on the Central Coast of California and you’re interested in learning about blogging, building platform and everything a 21st Century author needs to know, Anne will be teaching at a seminar called THE TECH SAVVY AUTHOR with Catherine Ryan Hyde, screenwriter and radio personality Dave Congalton and a whole crew of smart techie folks on March 2nd.

#2 Interested in having your short fiction recorded for a weekly podcast?There’s no pay, but it’s fantastic publicity if your story is accepted by SMOKE AND MIRRORS. They broadcast about three stories a week. Spooky, dark tales preferred. No previous publication necessary. They judge on the story alone.

#3 Cash prizes for flash fiction. The San Luis Obispo NIGHTWRITERSare holding their annual 500-word story contest. Anybody from anywhere in the world is welcome to enter. Prizes are $200, $150 and $75. This is a fantastic organization that boasts a number of bestselling authors among their members, including Jay Asher, Jeff Carlson, and moi. (Well, some sell better than others :-) ) Deadline is March 31st.

#4 $3500 Grand Prize for literary short fiction. NO entry fee. The deadline for the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Contest for short fiction is February 1st.

#5 $2000 Grand Prize. NO entry fee. Call for Entries—The Flying Elephants Short Story Prize, sponsored by "Ashes & Snow" artist Gregory Colbert. ::: AndWeWereHungry, a new online literary magazine, seeks literary short stories for its debut issue fiction contest. THEME: "And We Were Hungry....," or "Hunger." For isn't it, to quote Ray Bradbury, hunger or "lack that gives us inspiration?"  Prize: One grand prize ($2000) + three finalists (each $1,000) + eight runner-ups. Deadline: March 31, 2013.

Do all aspiring authors need to blog?

The answer used to be: Only the ones who want to get published.

Now, agents and publishers are letting up on the requirement.

Recently, agent Rachelle Gardner changed her stance on blogs.“A few years ago, the standard wisdom was that authors, both fiction and non-fiction, should have blogs in order to gather an audience and build relationships with readers. Now, not so much. As social media and online marketing have evolved, my thoughts on blogging have changed. I think each author needs to carefully consider whether blogging is an appropriate vehicle for them.”

But she added that you need to be on social media somewhere. She says Goodreads, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or Google +  can help you establish yourself if you find blogging too daunting.

But if you’re a Boomer like me, you may find those other platforms MORE daunting. For the non-tech-savvy, blogging is the easiest to master. It’s also the social media platform that gives you the most control.

This week social media guru diva Kristen Lamb devoted a whole week of blogposts to explaining the reasons why “blogs are probably THE BEST use of an author’s time when it comes to building an author platform using social media.”

But some writers start to blog too early in their careers and find it’s a time suck that keeps them from their primary writing goals.

So when should you start blogging? I don't think you have to worry about blogging if—

• You’re at a stage where you need to put 100% of your writing time into learning your craft and getting that WIP onto the page.  
• You’re a student who loves your creative writing class and hopes to be a writer someday, but you’re not sure what genre you’ll want to write or if you'll want to write novels, screenplays, poetry or whatever..
• You’ve written a NaNo novel and a few short stories but you know you've got a lot to learn and you're not ready to start submitting things yet. 
• You’ve been to a few writers conferences and you’re working madly on edits on your first novel and you’ve got this new idea you’re just dying to get on paper...

• You’re a writer. Blogging uses a skill you’ve already got: putting words together to make sentences. 
• Other social media are subject to faddism and rapid changes. (Facebook has become much less effective now that you have to pay to reach more than a handful of readers. Other social media sites may follow suit.) 
• Blogging is the social medium that gives YOU the most control over your brand.

• You’re blogging to GIVE entertainment and information, not GET praise or free editing.
• If you’re not published, that book can never be sold, because you have given away “first rights.”

• Asks a question or provides an answer. 
• Attracts search engines. 
• Makes a good Tweet (even if you aren’t on Twitter, you want somebody else to tweet it and spread the word.) 
• Promises the reader something of value: information or entertainment 

Most complaints about authors by agents and editors as well as reviewers can be boiled down to the same offense. It's the major reason so many reviewers won't read self-published books by unknowns.