How to Blog Well: Caitlin R. Kiernan

I’ve been blogging here in this meager pamphlet named Urraca in full since January, after taking off more than a year a half from it. As many of you know, one of the main reasons I returned to the blogosphere is because I think writing is my nearest and dearest artform, and I think it’s important to communicate with other people. In today’s environment, technology is an indispensable component of reaching out to others with your thoughts and words, and don’t let any old curmudgeon tell you any different. We’re no longer in a simple paper-based world.

When I finished my first complete novel manuscript, I knew I it was time to get back to my blog. If I was to get serious about getting my work published, chronology and process were important. Finish the work first, and discard all distractions, including blogging. And once I was done, well, the challenge was to incorporate blogging into a regular writing schedule. I think I’m doing all right in that department.

But today’s entry is less to do with me, than with someone else. One of the biggest influences, or rather, the biggest influence on how I devised the editorial guidelines for this blog came from the novelist Caitlin R. Kiernan. She’s written several novels that don’t easily cozy up to a single genre, and she writes about themes that really speak to me. She goes deep into gender, gender fluidity and sexuality, “steampunk,” science fiction, youthful characters on the fringe (as well as older ones on the fringe), overpowering dread and foreboding, and even Lovecraftian interdimentional horror. Her novel “Daughter of Hounds” will be on sale in September in paperback, you should get it.

What you should also do is check out Mericale, Hughes, Scheheraz’Odd & Touchshriek, Inc., Kiernan’s thoughtful blog, which is fed also off Live Journal for any of you LJ fanatics out there. She writes about the mundane details that usually only writers care about: word counts, manuscript edits, writing process. But that’s not all. She’ll also reveal interesting happenings in her professional capacity as a paleontologist, mention books and movies she loves and hates, and in general, provide a professional window into the life of a published writer and a singular human being. Hers is the only writer blog in my RSS feeds that I read with Germanic regularity. I never miss a single entry. She writes in her own voice without affectations, and from time to time, delivers candid views on more controversial topics. She also has a fondness for flora and fauna, which is a recurring theme here on this pamphlet, though I favor birds and insects, as you well know by now.

I think Kiernan’s blog (as well as Neil Gaiman’s and a handful of others), are the way these literary, bookwormy blogs should be written. Her Live Journal is informative, opinionated (but balanced), and of course, interesting. It also really helps inform the reader on the most important part, her fiction. Though I have no published novels under my belt, I blog using Kiernan as a model on how to do this little sleight-of-hand trick the right way. And if you, Gentle Readers, ever catch me biting her blog style, well now you can pinpoint the thing that makes my eyes glitter with good-hearted envy. You should read her blog, and you should buy her books. If you buy her books, she can write more. It’s that simple. True of any writer you enjoy.

All right, so it’s time to get back to work. All of it. The words. The day job. The calisthenics.

And you should too. You’ve been surfing all day, ignoring the thing you’re really supposed to be doing. Go! Work!