It seems like a long time ago that I started my blog
serial, The Twilight Zone. My wedding anniversary was fast
approaching when inspiration hit. We married at Bristol Zoo
during its 175th year which meant that a lot of the zoo’s history
was being publicised. Why not honour
this?
Unfortunately it was only a week to our anniversary date
so the writing of this blog serial didn’t go exactly to plan...
I have learnt a lot from writing this serial. It has been an interesting experience and one
that I hope to repeat, although perhaps a little differently next time...
Research
Due to the tight time constraints, I didn’t do a lot of
research as such on blog serials. I
googled it, found one that looked a lot like how I thought mine would look
anyway and that was it.
I spent more time trying to work out how to make the
story available for download from the blog, see below for this.
The majority of the research, perhaps as it should be,
was spent on Bristol Zoo itself. There is a lot of information on their website. The book, ‘An illustrated history of Bristol
Zoo Gardens’, was the most helpful piece of research however. A beautiful book full of stunning photos from
across the decades and all of the maps, showing the layout of the zoo . The maps were the most helpful part, and
allowed me to choose a decade and orientate myself.
A trip to the zoo to celebrate our wedding anniversary
also proved endlessly helpful, although I’m sure I looked a little mad trying
to write notes in the darkness of the nocturnal house.
A lot of what is in The Twilight Zone is fictional and
the research already carried out by the zoo, along with a few internet
searches, made it easy to figure out where I need to add in my own ideas and
which parts I needed to change. I can’t
find any evidence of there ever being a bat-eared fox at Bristol Zoo, I have
also never been backstage at the nocturnal house so had to base these scenes on
backstage zoo programmes on television.
I wanted something different for this story. No werewolves or vampires or ghosts or
zombies. It took me a while to find the
kitsune but once I did, I got very excited.
I held my breath as I searched for nocturnal foxes but thankfully didn’t
have to wait long for the bat-eared fox to pop up. I did quite a bit of research on the kitsune,
there are so many different mythologies around this creature, so many stories
and variations. I read as many as I
could before choosing a variation that best suited the story.
In the future, I would prefer to do more research before
starting to write. Writing The Twilight
Zone was stressful, purely because I was looking things up as I went and I left
myself very open to getting silly things wrong.
Preparation
Erm, yes, well...there was none really. Other than what I’ve already mentioned.
For my next blog serial I will write the whole thing
before I post any instalments. That had
been the plan for this one but, as I say, time got away from me.
For The Twilight Zone, I wrote each instalment the week
it would be posted which means that the end product will need heavy editing.
On the other hand, this meant that during a time when I
am editing one novel and contemplating the editing of another novel, I was
still writing at least 1000 words a week.
Definitely not a bad thing.
Posting
Right, it took me a while to figure this out. To make documents available to download on
your Blogger blog, follow these instructions;
1. Log
in/sign up with Google Groups - https://groups.google.com/. If you have a Blogger account for your blog,
you should be able to just sign in with the same details.
2. Click
on New Group.
3. Create
a New Group. I kept mine restricted to
E-mail List but left everything else open so that it can be discovered but I
mainly wanted people to find the documents through my blog.
4. Click
Create Group and your group now exists!
5. Go
into your group and click New Topic in the top left.
6. Enter
a subject and attached the document as a PDF (or whatever file you want to make
available).
7. Click
post! This will be e-mailed to you, it’s
annoying but I haven’t spent much time figuring this out yet.
8. Now
go into the posted message and right click over ‘Download’.
9. Select
‘Copy Link Location’.
10. Then
write your blog post/page and insert the link you just copied into hyperlink
option.
11. Ta
da!
Feedback
My Friday blog serial posts are the least read posts of
my blog. There. I admitted it. I don’t have figures for how many people have
visited the page but the post figures are quite depressing.
I wanted to get some of my writing onto this blog. Which isn’t such a stupid
idea. I have a pile of short stories but
they were all involved in competitions and couldn’t be posted elsewhere, which
is why I thought this would be an interesting venture.
The feedback I have received from friends and family has
been very positive.
I have tried to push it out towards non-friends and
family and the only response I seem to have had is basically ‘I’ll read it if
you finish it.’ To be honest I found
this a little insulting, although I didn’t rise to it. So while many don't seem to be interested at
the moment, I wonder how many will read it once it is complete?
For future blog serials I hope to be a little more
established and so will have a steady marketing strategy in place.
Future
Writing this blog serial has been a very interesting
experience and I feel that I’ve learnt a lot.
The Twilight Zone will be edited and brought together into one document for free download.
Originally I considered this serial to be a part way
novelette, between the first and second Emily May books. However, since writing I have started
rethinking the existing first Emily May book
(The-Book-Previously-Known-As-Silver) and have been recently thinking about
incorporating The Twilight Zone, in some format, actually into one of the
books.
For my next blog serial, I vow to prepare, research and
write and edit the whole thing before I start posting. I already have an idea and it will hopefully
make an appearance in the summer of 2013.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading The Twilight Zone. Check out the final instalment tomorrow.
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