Sustained by strangers – the blogging community.

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I’m not here today. (Well, obviously I’m here, but I’m not at home.) Given that I’ve set this to post itself at 9 am (wonders of technology eh?) I’m hopefully somewhere between Cambridge and Bedford, maybe in a roadside cafe enjoying coffee, maybe on the road towards Bath Spa university. (I’m not. I didn’t finish the draft last night, so I’m currently titivating it in a McDs on the way home.)

I delivered a guest lecture to a creative writing class, at the invitation of Mimi Thebo. Which was fun. And because I believe in sharing, here are (most of) my notes, in the form of a blogpost, obviously.

First of all, my form or genre.

Basically I blog. I’ve been blogging for nearly 13 years, which makes me a complete dinosaur in blogging terms. I started on blogger, because wordpress didn’t exist way back then, but I’ve had sites on all sorts of platforms, from livejournal to tumblr. My main blog sits on self hosted wordpress, on its own domain liveotherwise.co.uk. Yes, the title is Making it up. It refers to our lifestyle – I live pretty much by the seat of my pants most days, not big on planning and Making it up as I go along sums it up nicely.

The blog was started to maintain community. I’m a home educator – I’ve currently two children at home of mandatory educational age, one 16 year old in school since September and a 4 year old who won’t be going. Way back in 2002 ish when my eldest child was two years old, I started looking for other home educators, and I found quite a few on an email list, spread all around the country. We emailed, lots, got together for camps, and at one of them, all decided to set up blogs, connected by a blog ring. Our blogs were our chats over the garden fence, our blog ring our virtual village. It takes a village to raise a child, after all.

A blog as a virtual diary is one thing. It didn’t stay that way. A few years back blogs became big – parent blogging became a thing, and brands wanted to deal with us. It was easy to get caught up in writing things for other people, and as other social media grew – twitter, facebook, g+ and so on, it also became easy to lose sight of what the writing was meant to be about.

For me, writing was about processing, understanding, recording.

I wrote through home education, job changes, and miscarriage. And miscarriage.

I wrote through the loss of my sister.

And I wrote through happier changes, new babies, a move to the seaside and a return to home education.

There’s kind of two types of blogger out there. There are people who write because they can’t not write, there are people who are pros, who’ve made their writing into a living. I think it’s hard to be both, because for me the best posts are the ones which resonate with people, which you can’t plan ahead, or make topical, or craft.

Having said that, one of the most popular posts on my blog, is actually a rant about the DPF on my Mazda car, so what do I know? And when I asked friends who are bloggers for their favourite/ best post, Sarah from maison cupcake sent me this about chocolate semolina pudding which is a recipe, and a story from her life.

If I were going to be a different kind of blogger, I guess I’d like to be funny. For example, I hugely respect The Bloggess. (Are we all OK with bad language? May contain swearing. Does contain swearing.) As well as being funny though, for six year running, the Bloggess and her readers have made Christmas for hundreds of people. You’ll want to read about the annual James Garfield miracles. (Sixth annual)

Then there’s Her Melness. She started writing when her husband died suddenly. She writes with clarity, simplicity and insight, and I find her inspirational.

Or how about someone like Cynthia at Musings of an Aspie, who was a fountain of knowledge for me, when I started exploring late diagnosis for autism.

I could go on all day listing people who have inspired me, who still inspire me. I meet new bloggers online regularly – and there’s always something I can learn from them, no matter how much I think I already know. So yesterday I was sent this post, about the naming of names which is all about what stories are ours to tell – worth reading for any blogger.

But now, having talked about my blogging history, I’d like to read you some of my blogging. I’ve selected three favourite posts, but don’t worry, I’m not going to read you my best performing ones. You don’t need to know about rubbish Christmas trees, or camping lists today. Instead, let’s have tired tweeting, unheard cheerleaders, so, autism, and we’ll finish with desiderata of blogging.

If any of that has inspired you to start blogging, here’s a couple of ideas to get you going. When you start you’ll want a Hello World style post – your first blog post. I don’t recommend mine 😉 You should also have an about page, which is a permanent introduction for people to refer to – think carefully about what goes here, and remember to update it regularly. And finally, if you’d like to do some slightly more exploratory writing, I’ll refer you to one more favourite post of mine, which is based on a writing exercise with instructions available online – Where I’m from.

(If you do have a go at any of this, pop back and leave me your links, I’d love to read.)