Yup, there I was this morning, fresh from a good night’s sleep and brimming with some REALLY INTERESTING things to say on the blog today…..

But then I forgot it all??

I mean it’s not as if halfway through putting on my trousers and makeup…….Ooops, scratch that. I don’t wear makeup.

Yeah, anyhow it’s not as if everything got lost in transition while I was getting dressed or anything – merely it all kinda filtered and drained out over the course of the day while I was reading what other people were doing during their day. In short, other people’s days became my day today.

So that’s the idea with blogging, is it? Or at least one of the ideas I guess? Man, you can spend decades just reading about what other people are saying and doing WITHOUT ACTUALLY having to say or do anything yourself! That would kinda make your own blog rather boring though….Unless of course you wrote in your own blog what other people were doing during their day through their own blogs. A very cyclic thing methinks? I wonder if anyone is doing that? I wonder if EVERYONE is doing that? Mmmmmm, my head hurts now…..

OK….well….anyhow, I did get the chance to go to some cool blogs today but I forgot to grab some URLs along the way so I can’t show you where they are, unfortunately. Ohhh, I know where I found most of them though? It all started with the Organic Shadows blog because I read somewhere that they were having a competition of some kind. I think I read it in the WordPress support forums now I think about it? I guess that makes the WordPress site the starting point in actual fact?

Anyhow, there were a lot of cool and interesting links (for me anyway) at the Organic Shadows site and I spent most of my time there checking them out. I joined up and logged on to various blog….thingies – most of which I need to educate myself on. I checked out my Technorati score – absolutely zero links! Which is understandable really, considering that I’ve only told one other person about this blog.

I also went to Blogshares, realizing that I knew very little about how it operated and what you do there. It kinda looks like fun though so I’ll go back again and try and work it out. I also signed up to Blogwise and Blogarama – the last one being somewhat dubious in it’s popular blogs category as it seemed to have a disproportionate number of porn and gay related websites? Yup, I may have just locked The Speckled Band into the gay category of blogs. Ohhh well, no biggie! Just gotta get a rejection form email together I suppose in case anyone comes a calling? Then again the way things have been here lately I might not wanna limit myself too much?

I also registered another domain name for this blogsite. Why you ask? Why not I say! Yup, if you go to http://www.thespeckledband.com you’ll actually end up back here. Cool huh? We’ll OK….but what about www.iwannabeafamouswriter.com I hear you say? And what’s with that name in the first place? you may also ponder. Well, tis a short story there fortunately.

About three years back when I was chasing up some American agents and publishers I thought of an idea to use a website to showcase my work. In less than two days I set up the domain name, a complete website and mailed out to about 20 publishers and agents. Pretty much all of them sent me back rejection letters and most of them didn’t even go to the site. One publisher, Abrams of New York, was interested in my work but I’ve not followed it up yet – mainly because Amy changed her mind about illustrating childrens books and that kinda left me without someone to sketch out the ideas for me. Not that I’m that worried about it as I decided late last year that I might have a go and train myself to do the prelim work that needs to be done.

Chronicle Books on the west coast – publishers of the Griffin and Sabine series amongst other things – have also expressed interest in my work in the past so it’s well worth me chasing them up when I’m able to as well.

One strange thing about Abrams though is that a friend and mentor of mine, Graeme Base, suggested quite a few times that I should try and see if they would be interested, but I never chased them up or even looked into it. Had I done so I would have realized that Abrams publishes all of Graeme’s books in the U.S. – and the guy’s sold millions! Had I known I would’ve jumped on it when I had more energy! I should add that Graeme was one of the judges for the MacMillan Book Prize when Dominique Falla and I won it for Woodlore back in 1992.

Anyhow, most of the pages that were up on the web for www.iwannabeafamouswriter will be incorporated into the new blog site after I’ve fixed them up a bit……And I WILL do an “About Me” page soon, I promise!

For now though, I’m outta here!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2005 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Children's Books, The Web, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.