Sunday, May 10, 2015

A warm, humid morning, more July than May. Another week of unseasonable weather has brought the Baltimore Orioles, white-crowned sparrows, and many more finches—American goldfinch, purple finch, house finch, both red and orange varieties. Tulips, daffodils and spirea are blooming. White blooms on the Serviceberry tell me it’s time to prune the roses.

I’ve finished the latest revision of my WIP. This time through I concentrated on plot, looking for holes and places where I had made it too easy for the protagonist. Tomorrow, I’m going to give description a hard look, to make sure my characters are grounded in time and place.

I’m trying a new piece of software, new to me that is, called Evernote, a way to store pieces of information, images, web-sites etc that come my way into a more coherent arrangement than bookmarks. My bookmark folder is unwieldy at best so I’m looking forward to using Evernote and Evernote Web-clipper.

One of the articles I found this week concerns blogging. The author, Philip Kleudgen, on the site Write to Done, gives 10 suggestions on giving a blog a title that will take it viral. He puts content that shines at number 5 with the following checkpoints:

S – Specificity
H – Helpfulness
I – Immediacy
N – Newsworthiness
E – Entertainment value

Number 1 talks about numbers, in headlines. We’ve all seen them and used them but apparently the numbers 10, 16, 21 and 25 are particularly good at seducing readers.

I suggest those of you who blog or are interested in blogging read the full article. Useful information, from Mr. Leudgen who blogs at  RestaurantCoverings.com. There are useful links in his bio as well and a pdf. of resources.

My garden this week.