Melissa Maygrove

  This is my   Insecure Writers Support Group   post for April 2024. Alex's awesome co-hosts this month  are:  Janet Alcorn, T. Powell Coltrin, Natalie Aguirre,  &  Pat Garcia! Please stop by their blogs and say thank you .  💻💻💻💻💻 How long have I been blogging?  Twelve years.  If you want to read my very first post, you can find it here . I decided to choose my own topic this month. At the beginning of this year, I made a new plan for my author business that included creating content in batches and pre-scheduling blog posts. (If you didn't grab the free planner, it's still there. Click the link.) Today I'm going to show you how I do it and give you some ideas for staying on top of your blogging obligations. I realize many of you already know this, but skim the post, just in case. Caveat: I use Blogger, so that is all I know and the platform the screenshots were taken from. But the principles can be applied to other platforms. ...

I am over at the Cowboy Kisses blog today.  I'd love it if you'd stop by! @CowboyKisses1 on Twitter Cowboy Kisses on Facebook

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  This is my   Insecure Writers Support Group   post for February. Alex's awesome co-hosts this month  are:  Louise - Fundy Blue ,   Jennifer Lane,   Mary Aalgaard,   Patsy Collins at Womagwriter,   and  Nancy Gideon! Please stop by their blogs and say thank you .  February 3rd question: Blogging is often more than sharing stories. It's often the start of special friendships and relationships. Have you made any friends through the blogosphere? Heck yeah! Although one of my longest-running friendships came first, before the blogging. I met Carrie Butler on a writer's site when I was looking for a CP. Being a marketing major, she drop-kicked me into  nudged me to start blogging right before one of Rachael Harrie's Platform-Building campaigns. That grew my following fast. 

I made a commitment to blog at least once a month, but I've been staring at this page for 10 minutes, trying to decide what to post. And that's after thinking about it off an on for days. I could tell you all that's been happening to me and my family, but that's not what this blog is for. I could complain about not making much progress on my current WIP, but then I'd sound like a broken record. I WILL take a moment to say how much I hate Blogger's new interface. Why must people fix what isn't broken? And why can't they give us a choice to keep the old design? Part of my blogging block is due to the fact I'm not visiting other blogs as much as I used to. I had to step back from the writing-blogging world to deal with life's responsibilities, and that has caused me to grow further and further out of touch with what's going on in the literary realm. It's proof, at least, that we bloggers feed off each other when it comes to inspiration. What...

Well, Katy, Texas, actually. A smaller city right on the western edge. And I'm not exactly hunkered down. Only on my days off. Despite my county's 'stay-at-home' order, I can't. I'm a nurse, so that makes me an essential employee. I wasn't sure what to post today, or even if I should. I decided to keep my promise to myself to blog at least monthly, despite the pandemic. There's enough scary news bombarding us, so I'll keep it upbeat.

My life has taken me on a wild ride over the last few years. I went from working part-time and launching a writing career to working full time and turning the focus on my day job (night job, actually) and my kids. The summer of 2017, I left my husband, became a single mom of of three teens, and then made it official with a divorce two years later. As of last spring, the kids are all 18+ and high school graduates. Two still live with me, but I'm able to set aside more of my time for myself. Come hell or high water, I'm making time to write.

We writers are constantly juggling our writing time with family, friends, chores, jobs, and social media. We often struggle to keep up with our blogging friends and give up writing time just to make all the visits and leave the expected comments.  I mean, you have to make 'em to get 'em, right? True. But now that I'm published, I have a very different perspective, and it has made me take a hard look at how my social media time is spent. I may lose some blogging friends over it, but I'm changing my behavior to fit my new priorities. This decision hasn't been easy. I enjoy visiting my writing buddies and chatting with you guys on social media. It's fun! 

This is my Insecure Writers Support Group post for November.   For more information about the group, see the bottom of this post. Alex's awesome co-hosts for November are : CD Coffelt, Tina Downey, Isis Rushdan,   and Michelle Wallace! Please stop by their blogs and say thank you. I sometimes dislike the tone of my blog, and I've been pondering how I can change it. Other bloggers post encouraging, lighthearted content that makes me laugh and smile...and makes me envious. If I could stay positive and look at things from a different perspective, I could be like them, too. Problem is, it's hard to have an upbeat attitude when fate keeps throwing you curve balls and you're largely unhappy with your life.

I've come across several bloggers who have difficulty remembering to post things on time, so I decided to offer a blogging tip today on organizing yourself and planning ahead for posts. While I recommend having some kind of calendar or notebook to keep track of your blog, this tip adds another layer of organization. (Caveat: This tip is for Blogger blogs.) When you have a recurring posts, like Alex J Cavanaugh's IWSG or special posts you need to hold the date for, you can create place-holder reminder posts for yourself and save them for later. Just start a New Post Fill in any text, images, and links you have so far Schedule the date and time you want it to launch Then create some kind of title that lets you know what it is when you see it on your dashboard Since you're putting the post in draft mode, it doesn't have to be perfect. You'll have a chance to change it and polish it up before you publish. Here's what one looks like on the Posts da...

We all want our blogs to get noticed. One way that happens is by word of mouth...or chirp , as the case may be. Today I'm going to pass on a blogging tip I learned from Ava Jae over at Writability . Ava frequently adds a couple of custom tweet links at the bottom of her posts, and I love them because they're so easy to use. When I asked her how she makes them, she kindly obliged me with a lesson. In the spirit of 'watch one, do one, teach one,' I'm passing it on to you. But my blog already offers a 'tweet this' option at the bottom of my posts, you say. That's true. But does it let you customize the tweet? As far as I know, the person tweeting can edit it, but the blog owner can't. And it doesn't shorten the URL either. By creating your own custom tweets and posting the links at the bottom of your blog articles, you can encourage visitors to spread the word about your post with the ease of a couple of clicks. Here's how it work...

Like many authors thrust into the world of social media by the marketing and networking demands of the craft, I'm still learning the technology side of maintaining a blog. I decided to mention a few tricks I've discovered and invite others to share their tips, too. Making our blogs user friendly is important, and Google's Blogger gives us several tools to do that. Since I've addressed Captcha and other comment restrictions before, I'll just link that page and move on. (For those who don't know, the only comments I restrict on this blog are anonymous ones.) Besides making it easy for visitors to comment, we also need to make it easy for them to interact with our posts. By that, I mean we should take care to make embedded links both visible and easy to use. Let's start with visibility...

Modern authors need to feel confident about more than just writing. Marketing and social media participation is a must, and we need to be conscious of our online persona. For my IWSG post this month, I decided to address social media venues and habits, with an emphasis on things to do and things to avoid. I hope you’ll find something helpful. I’ll start off with Twitter .

I was thrust into the world of social media rather suddenly, and I've been flying by the seat of my pants when it comes to blogging. I'd like to know what you think--what you like and what you don't. Please take a moment to vote in the following four polls, and then feel free to elaborate in the comments section. As with other polls I've taken, my one request is that you either vote in all of the polls in this group or none of them. Thanks. :)

First, I'd like to announce the winners of last week's giveaway. The winners of the 5-page critiques are : First crit: Natasha Hanova of ' Writes By Moonlight ' Second crit: Hope Roberson of ' Writing With Hope ' And the third crit--two crits actually (because I'm feeling generous = P)--go to... Sara H. & Joel P. , two of the OYANer students who are studying writing using the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum. Sara & Joel are home-schooled students, both in 11th grade. The winner of the $15 Amazon gift card is : Jamie DeMoville Adams Woot!!! Here's proof Rafflecopter chose -- not me: = ) To everyone who participated - Thank you! And to C.B. Wentworth - Thanks for the award and the kind mention. ; ) Visitors - if you haven't started following CB's blog, you should. I also wanted to throw this in... For a super-interesting post on indie publishing by Susan Kaye Quinn, click here . ### Now for today...

This is a short post about word verification a.k.a. 'Captcha' on Blogger (Google) blogs. The purpose of word verification is to prevent automated spam. You may not even realize you have it, because it doesn't require you to do it when making comments on your own blog. But it will discourage visitors from posting comments, so you should seriously consider turning it off. If word verification is on, your visitors will see something like this when they post  a comment: After typing their comment, they must decipher and enter the wavy words shown and get them exactly right, caps and all before their comment will be posted. When someone is visiting several sites or posting multiple comments, this gets very old very fast. From what I've been told, Blogger controls spam fairly well, so this really isn't needed. As an added layer of protection, I restrict anonymous posts to my site. So far, I've not had any problems with spam or inappropriate comments. (5-30...

With all the traffic from the Campaign , I thought this might be a good time to start a discussion about writer's blogs (or is that writers' blogs?). I'm a blog newbie, but--visiting as many as I have--I'm quickly discovering what I like and don't like about them. I want to hear what my fellow writers and writing blog visitors have to say on the subject. What do you like?  What don't you like?  What turns you off, and what keeps you coming back?  And my blog is fair game, so don't pull any punches on my account.  ; )