Damian Robb

Today I want to blog about bloggers.

I’ve spoken before about how I started this blog after signing up to the newsletter of comic book writer/novelist/futurist/mad genius Warren Ellis; and being inspired by it (which you can sign up to here if you’d like). It’s a weekly treat that lands in my inbox that I often giddily enjoy over a cup of coffee. As a professional writer of words he often details in these newsletters the various projects he’s working on and occasionally his process of putting those wonderful stories of his together. Usually by the time I get to the end of the newsletter my mind is inflamed, in part because my now guzzled cup of coffee is rolling in with a kick arse caffeine buzz, but also because reading about him writing makes me want to write.

My revamped mission of be-a-better-writer-you-idiot has involved a lot of me organising all my various projects and working out a constantly evolving plan and timeline for each one so I have a clear idea of what each project needs to keep moving forward. The next phase of the mission is to continue to educate myself, and I figure if Mr Ellis’ newsletter works to educate and inspire me with all things writing then that’s probably something I should try to bolster. Of course as much as I’d like Ellis to write a blog everyday in order to kick start my creativity that might be asking too much of a man I’ve never met. Instead I decided that where there’s one there must be more. There must be other writers I look up to and draw inspiration from out there who are writing their own blogs or newsletters. I just needed to find them.

I became a hunter. The blogs and newsletter of talented writers were my prey, the internet was my hunting ground, and google was my weapon. Warren’s newsletter themselves were a good starting ground as he occasionally offered suggestions of similar newsletters. I signed up to a few, and waited with anticipation for their arrival. My favourite thus far is one called Municipal Archive by Kio Stark. It rolls into my inbox spasmodically and each newsletter details a well written, and often moving, interaction the writer has had with a stranger. Each one is basically a tiny story that never fails to engage, and I really can’t recommend this one enough.

All my new subscriptions however weren’t enough. I wanted more. I was catching the newsletters but the blogs were managing to get through my net. A quick search showed me that, yes, a number of my favourite writers did in fact maintain a blog on their websites, the problem now was the ease to which I accessed them. I had become used to my idol’s words coming to me and the idea of routinely making the rounds on a number of websites in the hope that they’d been updated didn’t entice. I figured I can’t have been the first person in this quandary and another google search proved this to be true, and provided an answer. Feedly.

Feedly is a website/app that provides (as wikipedia cleverly puts it) a news aggregation service. Basically it uses rss feeds from websites to notify you whenever an update to those website is made, or, in other words, it’ll tell me when there’s a new blog in town I might be interested in. There’s a few different websites like this but I found feedly easy to use and, even better, easy to read. Once you make an account, which I did simply by logging in to my google account, you can sign up to get feeds from whatever website you like. This is made easy to do by the app’s search functionality that easily finds the website you’re after and even suggest similar ones you might be interested in. Once it’s found the website you’ve searched for you simply click the ‘+feedly’ button and that’s it; you’ll now get those blogs sent to your feedly whenever they’re updated where you can read, share, or save them at your leisure. It’s now become a daily pleasure for me to make my way over to my feedly in the morning (accompanied by a cup of coffee) and read through whatever new blogs the writers have written.

In case you’re interested, my current subscriptions are Brandon Sanderson, Matt Fraction, Warren Ellis (he keeps a blog as well as the newsletter, bless him), Neil Gaiman, Patrick Rothfuss, Ramez Naam, John Scalzi, and V. E. Schwab. The problem now becomes that not all writers keep blogs, which I find a bit strange. To me it would seem that the nature of being a writer is to write, and that of all the people out there likely to have a blog writers should be at the top of that list. Maybe they’re just busy writing stories, which I also want to read, so I can’t complain too much.

Either way, with this daily dose of inspiration and information my education should increase and hopefully with it my writing improve. In the meantime I’ll just have to keep an eye out for new blogs to add to the list.

The hunt continues.

Talk soon.

Damian