Tweaking my schedule for 2015

As 2014 draws to a close, I’m ready to review my objectives for the year and set some new ones.  As part of that, I’ve been planning some new regular features, and that means a slight shift of my posting schedule.  Of course, if you receive notifications by email (and you can sign up in the box on your left), it won’t make much difference to you.

My mind has been turning over the question “how do I want to present myself on my blog” for some time.  I’m generally happy with what I share with you, and think some things are absolutely right.  I’m a writer, so I write – e.g. my flash fiction.  I also read, so I share my book reading adventures with you, in the book reviews.  However, it does occur to me (and I’ve mentioned it before) that sometimes I can let my blog become a book promotion site, and visitors could leave without realising at all that I write, and what I write.  It’s not that I want to push my books down your throats at the slightest chance, but I would like you to realise that I write more obviously, and I would like to gain more visitors who see what I write, like it and come back again.  So, my friends reading this, I hope I am going to keep doing the things you like, do less of what you don’t like, and add in some new content you find equally interesting and that attracts more regular readers.

There are some writing link-ups that I’ve been watching and trying to fathom out over the year, and so I’m going to jump on their bandwagon.

• Fiction in 50 (FI50) is a monthly flash fiction in fifty words on a theme set by Bruce Gargoyle.  I think I’ve got that right!  If I haven’t, I’m sure he’ll correct me.  So I’ll post my even-shorter-story-than-usual and then link it to his monthly link-up post.
• The Insecure Writers Group (ISWG) is a group heavily populated with people I’ve met on the A to Z Challenge.  When I first saw it, I thought, I don’t want to do that.  Over this year I’ve realised that it would be fun, and I’m as insecure about my writing as the next person.  Heaven knows what I’ll find to talk about, but I’ll try.
• I usually do a few book reading challenges in the year, but rarely do anything other than put the badges in my sidebar and tell you what happened at the end of the year.  The feedback I got on sprucing up my webpage suggested I got rid of them and put the challenges in a page.  I could do a monthly update – possibly updating only one a month, so you got a quarterly update on each of them, in rotation.  I might remember to do all of them, too.
• Posting the excerpts from the Princelings for Read Tuesday reminded me that people like quotes, whether from my books or other people’s, and they translate to Twitter very well, too.
• I really enjoyed something I saw on A Woman’s Wisdom which was a fictionalised account Downton-Abbey style of what was going on in the blogger’s life.  It made me think of doing an occasional post by one of my characters on daily life in… the castle, the space ship, wherever…

I reckon those five things will make a nice feature – and given that the ISWG meets on a Wednesday, I am planning to do them on Wednesdays in rotation.

Given that Wednesdays and Thursdays are usually the days I do Book Blasts, you may wonder how I’m going to fit those in.  The answer is that I’m going to be much more selective about them next year.  I’m also going to be even more selective about the book reviews I take on as part of a bloghop or blast.  I do want to ‘pay forward’ and support my fellow indie authors, but I think I got a little ahead of myself this year, and I don’t want to take on new books without a high degree of confidence that I’ll enjoy them.  With my To Read list having grown by another 50 books this year in spite of reading more than my target of 60, I have to do something to get through that backlog!  There were two books that got into my list of top books for 2014 that came from tours, so I won’t abandon them entirely.

I threw in some Sunday posts late in the year, mainly because of Philae landing on the comet, doing its stuff and then dying for lack of sunlight.  Given my hope to bring out some scifi next year, I think having a Sunday Science snippet might be fun.

The big question is whether to bring back the Tuesday haiku.

If I stick to four days a week, it’ll be Monday, news etc, Wednesday feature, Friday Flash and Saturday book review.

I never aimed to blog every day.  For a writer, four days is enough. So if I fancy a haiku it’ll be on Wednesday, but if I throw in a Science snippet, it’ll probably be Sunday.

What would you like me to do?