A friend left a comment on FaceBook about one of my recent In-n-Out Burger posts:

“What kind of writing do you do? (Besides movie and restaurant reviews. 😂) . 

Good question. It would seem that even if one looked at my website (joebustillos.com), and not just my FaceBook posts, they still might not be able to answer to the question, what kind of writing do I do? Ack. Definitely need to fix that. 

Then I went to a writer group meeting where a publicist who works with authors (like the late Michael Crichton) said that even before beginning the two year journey of writing your book, you need to think about how the publicist is going to sell the book to news/book segment producers and media people. You actually have to think beyond just being a good writer. He said writing is the easy part. The hard part is how you (or your publicist) will bring the work to your audience. Also, who is your audience? And don’t you dare say “everyone!” Shit, I think we have a problem here.

Looking at my website, I’m admittedly all over the place. My friend’s question is well founded. It’s a problem that I’ve been well aware of since I went to one of my first writer’s conferences in the 1980s. Authors’ first question to me when I went up to talk with them was if I wrote fiction or nonfiction. When I said both that seemed to kill the conversation. They didn’t know how to respond, because that’s the first thing you’re suppose to figure out, whether you are working in the fiction or non-fiction world (SIDE NOTE: At the time the Evangelical Christian publishing world was just beginning to open up to supporting writers who wanted to write fiction, because prior to this, the Non-Fiction/Fiction schism was about writing things that were TRUE or FALSE. Ack).¹. During the 1980s I was writing short stories and hadn’t really caught the journalism bug yet. Then I buried myself in school, first Fuller Seminary, then CSUF as an Anthropology major then Journalism, then Chapman University for teacher education. 

I was funding all of this education with my job at the phone company and never quite made the step into any kind of full time writing, even after getting my B.A. in Journalism. I really wonder what combination of things steered me away from that choice and instead into choosing to become a teacher. ² The result was my love of writing took a back seat to teaching, but along the way I used my desire to write as a personal incentive to promote communication skills with my students.³ Coming to teaching from being a technician with the phone company, I approached the classroom a bit differently. I didn’t do “one thing” as a classroom teacher but was always making combinations or connections that led me to use more technology than my coworkers, which then led to teaching tech, despite having no formal training in the subject. Even with my Master’s Degree in Educational Technology, it was more about learning further principles of education and the philosophies behind using technology in the classroom than straight IT or some other technical training. I had years of experience teaching, teaching using technology and teaching technology but no real credentialing for those subjects. I taught social studies, basic communications skills, journalism, basic technology skills, media literacy, and eventually robotics. I was a writer who taught technology. I was a hybrid that didn’t fit in a world where one was expected to fit into single boxes. 

Little wonder that when I began putting my thoughts onto webpages and blogs it was rarely about any one subject. It was whatever I was doing at the time. Sometimes it was about my journey as a tech-enthusiast, sometimes it was about struggling with my religious identity and personal relationships, sometimes it would be about what was happening in my classroom(s) and sometimes it was about what was happening in the world around me. Funny that two-decades of posting my thoughts and observations online that they’ve tended to be of the non-fiction variety, just never about any one subject. And so the blogs over the years have reflected that same scattered collection, which would contribute to why my efforts have never caught on or were even remotely “viral” (being scattered subject-wise and my aversion to self-promotion).

Because my online writing has never been about one thing, I experimented with keeping separate blogs on the various subjects. But that never quite worked for me. As with everything else in my life, I tended to combine several subjects into one post, making me wonder where to put said post(s). So I started using a magazine-style blog-theme, where I could have all the different subjects highlighted on the home page, just like a newspaper or magazine. But then, depending on what was going on in my life, one area (like education) would get article after article and another area (like religion or dating) would be noticeably neglected. Several times over the years I put myself on a schedule to write on specific subjects on specific days of the week, but that didn’t work because many subjects (like this one) often takes more than one day to write,  and because I knew that consistency was the name of the online game, I felt like I needed to post something every day. But, except for the much shorter, reflection prompt posts, I couldn’t maintain the schedule. And we were back to inconsistent posting and gaps in what things I wrote about. So I switched from the magazine theme to a theme that showed the daily flow but highlighted all the different subjects. Too bad most readers come to the blog via a link in social media and if they read/see the whole article, they never see the front page. Thus, the legitimate “What do you write about?” Question. Damn. I think the problem is a bit deeper than blog homepages and themes. 

One of my writing heroes going back to the when I first thought to get a home computer to facilitate my writing was the late great Jerry Pournelle, science fiction writer extraordinaire and Byte Magazine columnist with his monthly Chaos Manor column. This started years before the web was a thing, but eventually Pournelle’s columns made their way to the Chaos Manor website. First example being posted in HTML without a blogging or CMS platform, but the later example no doubt is using some blogging platform. 

Pournelle was a successful science fiction novelist who did a monthly “these are the technologies I’m experimenting with” column. I think that was kind of the model that I was thinking about when I started posting online. But I was also greatly influenced by my experiences making my academic websites for my Masters degree and later with my doctorate work at Pepperdine. Again, I was trying to combine the “here’s what I’m experimenting with” writing with “here’s what going on in the world” with everything including the kitchen sink. Something definitely got lost in the mix. 

I was spending a lot of time, energy and money on this blogging thing and my writing (fiction/novel) was non-existent. Then I had a student at Full Sail University, Tom Lucas, who had a slightly similar media-to-teaching trajectory as I had taken and he was in the process of publishing his first novel, Leather to the Corinthians.. He was using the free WordPress.com platform to share his work online. Free sounded a hell of a lot better than what I was doing, so I tried to shift everything to WordPress.com. 

The conversion process from platform to platform wasn’t seamless, but I’d already experienced that when I moved from LiveJournal, so a few links got broke along the way. And the “cost” of using the WordPress free site was that there were fewer options than I had been used to. But I adjusted and experimented with a few themes. One theme that I tried featured only four posts on the homepage, which worked with what I was trying to do at the time, writing four articles with a unifying topic (like “Mistakes Were Made” or “What Do People Mean When They Say ‘Everything Happens for a Reason’”:).

Revisiting my old inspirations and my old work, I can see that I just made it all way too complicated and spent a lot of energy trying to capture a magazine look that no one would even see and at a pace/spread of subjects that no one could possibly do with the consistency needed to be “successful.” Ack. 

First error is that I convoluted the need to write every day with the need to post consistently. Posting consistently is not the same as posting every day. For example, I’ve been working on this article for over two weeks. If I want to post things of quality, they take time to research and craft. Attempting to do them daily, with a set pattern of which subjects get posted on which days (like Monday Meditations, Tech Tuesdays, What’s in the News Wednesdays, Education/History Heroes Thursdays and Video Fridays) might only be sustainable if I gave myself a month to build up a surplus of articles, took regular breaks or vacations and wasn’t working on anything else. I mean, it’s not like anyone is paying me to put out this work… Also, in that most of my writing friends are not working in blogging but in writing books, I definitely feel like I need to focus on the fiction side of my writing. Based on looking at my current homepage I write on 20 subjects and the fictional side is completely buried if not invisible. I need to fix that.

First thing is that I need to make a line between my journalism (non-fiction/editorial) writing and my fiction work. And as much as I like having five different flavors of my articles on education (conference notes, disruptive ed-tech, education re-examined, the intentional educator) could probably all fall under the “adventures in education” category. At the same time “Writing Projects” doesn’t quite indicate if one is going to find one of my short stories or a reflection on the writing process. My buddy, Tom Lucas, has it all spelled out on his homepage, Contact/Books/Bio/Written Works/Media/Blog-News with no confusing distractions. The publicist I encountered at the beginning of this article said your online presence needs the following: 

• Home
• About the book
• About the author
• Press kit
• Media
• Contact

Yeah, that part of my homepage is not so great. The journalist side of me will still want to find some way to surface my many areas of interest (but far less than 20). I just need to better balance between the fiction and non-fiction side and make it easier for a visitor to know what they are going to find based on categories and tags that are more clear.  Here we go again (redesigning my homepage/blogs). TO BE CONTINUE…

Sources:

• Meditation on Being a Writer and Being Scattered by Joe Bustillos (2023-08-21), https://joebustillos.com/2023/08/meditation-on-being-a-writer-and-being-scattered/
• Chaos Manor Musings – The View from Chaos Manor (The Original Blog) by Jerry Pournelle (2020-06-01), https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ 
• Dr. Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor (2020-06-08), https://www.jerrypournelle.com/sciencefiction/ 
• Tom Lucas – Writer (retrieved on 2023-02-13), https://room1331.home.blog/ 
• Amazon Link: Leather to the Corinthians (2012) by Tom Lucas, https://amzn.to/48lxT4H 

1. Meditation on Being a Writer and Being Scattered by Joe Bustillos (2023-08-21), https://joebustillos.com/2023/08/meditation-on-being-a-writer-and-being-scattered/ [↩]
2. Whenever I’ve bemoaned not going into professional journalism in the 1990s the journalists that I’ve talked to look at me like I dodged a bullet… but I still wonder.[↩]
3. My 15 years with the phone company also gave me some confidence working with and troubleshooting technology and the funds to dip my toes into buying my own personal computer(s). When I switched to teaching, it was natural for me to find ways to use technology to do the job “better.”[↩]