Taking the “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” Challenge

Over the next 31 days I’ll be running Maastricht Minutiae through it’s paces with the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge (31DBBB) along with the other lady bloggers in the SITS community.  31DBBB is a eBook by Darren Rowse, the owner of the wildly successful Problogger and all the various products that go with it.  The book itself takes you through a series of tasks that force you to think critically about why you blog, how you write, and what you do to build a community.

I’ll probably be posting frequently about the challenge here in addition to my usual blogging, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions feel free to make them. Now with no further ado, my answer to the day one task.

Day One Challenge: Write an Elevator Pitch

“A spotlight on the adventure and realities of expat life in Maastricht.”

Are you a Lady Blogger?

If you’re a lady blogger, feel free to join me and 400 other bloggers at the SITS community as we work through these challenges. You can learn more about the 31DBBB book here.

NaBloPoMo May

I’ve been rather lacks in my blogging activities as of late, so I’m trying to put a fire under my butt this month with a good old fashion NaNoWriMo-inspired event. NaBloPoMo: National Blog Posting Month. The object of the event is to post on your blog every day for a month. Personally, I will be splitting my posting between Maastricht Minutiae & my new webcomic site design blog over at Fallen Kitten Productions (home to our webcomic and my web services biz). If you’d like to follow all my posting this month, please sign up for both RSS feeds: Maastricht Minutiae RSS & Fallen Kitten RSS. Maybe this will be the start of a more active blogging trend in the future.

So I hope you enjoy it and if you see me missing an update, feel free to give me a swift kick in the pants. Or whatever metaphor is appropriate here in the Netherlands.

Of High Tea and Blogging Honors

Wow. Two posts in one day. What is this blog coming too?

Yesterday was a good day. Dan and I visited Atomic comics in Sittard; the closest comic book store to Maastricht, followed by high tea at John Mullins. After our late “lunch”, I got some good blogging done and then we went out for drinks with a couple from our language class.

After dinner I discovered that Dave, a fellow Maastricht-based blogger from Random Walks in the Low Country, had recognized Maastricht Minutiae with the Beautiful Blogger Award. I’ve never received a blogging award nomination before and I’m very honored. I read Random Walks and really enjoy how Dave sounds so natural living here. His photos are always tipping me off to things that I’ve missed.

The award comes with some required actions, including writing seven things about myself and nominating up to 7 additional bloggers. So without further ado…

5 Nominated Bloggers

1. Invading Holland: Very funny.
2. 24 Oranges: The first expat blog I started following when we move to the Netherlands.
3. Crossroads Magazine: Great for Maastricht-related stories.
4. Franco Phoney: Whose blog about living in France I discovered via Absolute Write.
5. PlagiarismToday: Which isn’t about expats at all, but has great information about plagerism, copyright, and other similar issues.

(more…)

"Dear Annalaan" Published on Crossroads Magazine

The article I wrote about Sint Annalaan has been published on Crossroads Magazine as part of a two-part article about an international family and how they came to name their daughter “Annalaan”. Part one of “Ever named a kid?” is written by Eric Lemay, who lives with his family in the US, about how he and his wife named their daughter. Part two is my letter to Annalaan sharing as much about the place she was named after as possible. We also sent her some goodies like menus and newspapers from the area.

I am pretty excited about this article going live, so I encourage you to swing by Crossroads Magazine and check it out.

NaNoWriMo 2009: The Blogger Rebellion

I’ve mentioned before on this blog that I was planning to do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this year. Well, I’ve made the commitment elsewhere so it is time to make it official here. 50,000 words by midnight, November 30th or else I turn into a pumpkin. Or something.

NaNoWriMo, for those who don’t know, is a yearly challenge to write a minimum 50,000 word novel during the month of November. What started 10 years ago with 21 participates in the US has grown into an international event with over 150,000 participants! For the month of November, I am dedicating my blog to NaNoWriMo. I urge you to visit the website, sign up, and/or make a donation to the Office of Letters and Light to help them make this and other great writing events possible. I have set up a sponsorship link in the sidebar if you are so inclined.

The Messy First Act
This is my second year fighting for NaNoWriMo glory. In fact the predecessor of this blog (Single Stitch Studio) was where I first starting writing about the activity. It gave me an outlet besides the forums to express my struggles and elation at this new and strange artistic endeavor. For the first time in a long time I was positively vibrating with the pleasure of writing a novel and I lead my steampunk archivist on a winding adventure of pirates, archaeology, and mad scientists in search of a legendary airship. I won the competition by writing 50,000 words and by the end of December had a 80,000-something word manuscript of really terrible prose and poorly planned plot points. The novel now languishes in a drawer somewhere, but I must have liked the blogging part or else you wouldn’t be reading this.

And Now?
For NaNoWriMo 2009, I was torn between writing fiction and my blogging obligations so I’ve decided to cut down the middle and join the NaNo Rebellion. “Rebels” are simply people who commit to writing 50,000 words in a month (still a lot of work), but chose to write something besides a novel.

For fiction this year I thought I would try my hand at some shorter fictional prose in the form of six short stories about Dashiell, a cat detective who solves the animal crimes the humans of his world miss. I’m not the sort of person who is overflowing with plot ideas, so I take what I can get. I think its cute.

For the blog I hope to commit about 25,000 (edited) words. If my average blog post is about 500 words long, I should be able to get about 40-50 blog posts out of the activity. Either that or a bunch of very long articles. We’ll see. Hopefully these posts will give me a bit of a buffer going into the holiday season so Maastricht Minutiae will continue to update even while I’m busy with family.

Are you interested in National Novel Writing Month? You can find me on the website as Locusta. Also, Scrivener, a novel writing software for the Mac, is offering a 50% discount to all winners. I’m testing it out the month and will be buying it weather or not I “win”. It makes organizing my blog posts and research easier.

Ok, off to write the next post. See you all soon.

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