Problogger.COMmunity

I love message boards. While I’m not as active on them as I used to be, I used to live on roughly twenty different forums, and would post left right and centre. The conversations had on them were priceless and I had lots of  fun.

Darren Rowse, creator and runner of Problogger and TwiTip has recently opened his latest venture; Problogger Community. The website is a paid community message board specially for bloggers to promote their sites and discuss blogging techniques. After just a week it already has well over two thousand active members.

I paid for a months subscription (at the moment the site costs $1.95 USD a month, but Darren has said that as the site gets bigger and things get added the price for NEW subscribers will go up, so it’s pretty cheap.), and wasn’t sure what to expect.
However, once my payment finally went through and I had access to the boards, I was impressed. While some of the discussions don’t prove directly helpful, it’s good reading. There’s a community challenge held weekly as well, which is a really good idea to encourage interaction between people and their blogs, and plenty of opportunities to be exposed to other people’s writing styles.

It’s a great way to improve my writing and blogging, and I thought it’d be something cool to show you guys, if you were interested and had the money to burn.

NaNoWriMo

It’s almost that time of year again.

For those that don’t know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. From November 1st to the 30th, the objective is to write a whole 50,000 word novel. No editting or anything like that, just writing.
Why? To get creative juices flowing. And I know a few people who have been planning and writing novels for years, and being a complete asshole I feel the need to belittle their work by doing this.

Last year I attempted it for the first time with a zombie story (of course). I’d worked it out that I’d need to clear roughly 1700 words a day to reach the deadline for the month, and a little extra. I was way ahead by the end of the second week when disaster happened. Scene: I’m at my laptop, fresh cup of coffee next to it, and finishing a DVD. When it finishes I decide to grab another to use as background noise while I type away. My bed is parallel to my desk, and my DVDs on the other side, so I lay across it to reach them. After a couple moments deliberation I settled on a movie, and flipped onto my back. That’s when I heard the ominous shut down noise of the computer and leapt up. The entire cup of coffee had fallen and poured over the laptop, killing it. No more novel, no more work, and a lot of coffee everywhere. It was a terrifying day for me.

After a few days mourning, I sat on a rusty old desktop from probably five years ago, and tried to start another novel. In the few days I had left before the end of NaNoWriMo, I managed to write 11,000 words of utter nothingness. Of course, that novel never got finished. All that’s left of it is the blurb, which I posted to DeviantArt in case anyone ever wants to see it.

This year I plan to actually finish the 50,000 words, and maybe even finish the novel itself. To be able to say I wrote a whole novel is nothing short of fantastic in my mind. As a plus, some years the organizers have a prize for winners. Last year every winner got a single copy of their novel published for personal ownership. Even without the prize though, it’s a fun even to participate in, provided you have the time.

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo as well, add me as a Writing Buddy or something, because I’m awesome.

Writing in a journal

I’m one of those guys who have a journal to write down feelings, and make the pages soggy with my tears. I’ve posted an entry on here before, and tend to just write random personal thoughts that probably shouldn’t be put out there in public.

However, how do you decide what to write about? Do you write about each day? There’d be a lot of boring entries, and half of them might be the same, unless you were exceptionally amazing. Or just particularly eventful…events that happen?

I’ve attempted to keep journals in the past, but more often than not they turn dark and I end up tearing pages out. I also wrote too much in them to the point that I ran out of things I wanted to, and they end up getting thrown in a drawer gathering dust. Trying not to do either of these things has proven hard, because what’s happened is now I rarely write in it. I don’t want to write anything bland or “emo” in there, but I do want to write in it. Then there’s this blog. A few times when I’ve wanted to write something in the journal, the urge to write it for the “public” has been stronger, and it’s ended up on here.

Trick is, I’m yet to find that middle ground. I’m just wondering if there’s anyone else who’s had this trouble, or doesn’t. Do you keep a journal of some form or another, and is it working out for you?

I have a writing gig…kinda

I am writing for TechMasher.com a bit now, just writing about random technology and computer things as they happen or I suddenly take an interest in them. I’m still trying to get comfortable so I’m not entirely comfortable with one or two bits of the posts, but I’m working on it. Here’s a small list of the posts I’ve got on there now (not many, of course, but what can you do). If you could take a look, I’d appreciate it. Woot.

• TweetDeck For The iPhone – I know I wrote a quick review here too, but the one on TechMasher was a bit more thought out, and I like it a lot better.
• 5 iPhone apps to boost productivity – I wrote this originally as a 10 apps post, where 5 would be useful apps, and 5 would be games/time wasters. It was too long, and broken into two parts. This is the first part, the second is scheduled for later today. When it does I’ll update this post with that link
• iD Software bought by Zenimax – Found out about this as soon as I connected back to the internet earlier today. Amazing stuff. I can’t wait to see how this affects future games.
• 5 iPhone apps to destroy productivity – The second part to 5 iPhone apps to boost productivity; details 5 addictive games on the iPhone

Thanks for looking at them, feel free to let me know on Twitter how much you hated them. WEEEEEEEEEEEEEE