Part 1
Hello everyone, my name is Dillon, and welcome to my blog. My initial plan for this post kind of went a little haywire, but I’ll talk more about that a bit later. For now, I want to take some time to go over what you can expect from both this blog and me as a creator. The first thing I would like to discuss is how I am going to be approaching my blog post entries. There was a period of time where I heavily considered writing up several months’ worth of posts in advance and uploading them one at a time every week.
However, I ultimately decided against doing that, and the main reason why is it felt like I wasn’t going to be one-hundred percent authentic with that method. Typing that bewilders me a bit, since I would have been writing about my life, and writing journey all the same, but I don’t know something about it just didn’t sit right with me.
Well, to be honest, I think it was more that I ended up preferring my current idea instead, which is to write out my thoughts in real time for these posts and then share them with all of you. So, sort of like I’d be writing a blog, which is rather fascinating considering that this is a blog page.
Anyway, to expand on what I just wrote, what you can expect every time you click on one of these blogs posts is to see me express my unmitigated thoughts and feelings about whatever it is I decide to write about. I’m not going to edit the wording on any of these posts to try and make sure I sound appropriate or whatever. Also, don’t take that to mean that I’m going to be posting about radical nonsense or whatever, I’m just going to write these sentences how they form in my mind without taking into consideration how anyone else may have wanted me to word something different.
To that end, please feel free to leave a review about anything you encounter on this site, I would truly love to see what all of you think, both the good and the bad. I know that I am not perfect, and there are probably plenty of flaws in my methods and executions, and I have a genuine desire to improve my craft, so if you feel you have some valuable insight for me, then I’m all ears; or whatever the reading equivalent of that is.
That said, the partial exception I am making is to this blog. Don’t get me wrong, I still want to know what you think about it, but I’ve pretty much already decided that I’m going to write these posts in the way that I would talk to you in person, so there’s not going to be a lot of changing the format, or focusing in more on a central topic per post or whatever. I’m just going to write what I want to write and say what I want to say and that will eventually lead to a point, hopefully, for both of our sakes.
Anyway, enough about me being all stuffy and whatever else people think of people who think they matter. Let’s get on to the things that do matter, namely the purpose of this website and this blog.
So, if you’ve done any clicking around before finding this post, then you probably saw either my projects or lore pages, so let me talk about the purpose of each page on this site and what you can expect from them moving forward. First is the Contact page. Use it if you want to get in touch with me about something. Obviously. Though, it would be pretty neat if some company out there had the idea to have their contact or support pages be about. . .uh, I don’t really know to be honest, not contacting them or something? I don’t know man, this whole writing thing is kind of surreal, so let’s just move on, even though I’m the one whose writing all of this.
Okay, so now that we, and by we I mean I, but also you since you’re reading this, are back on track, I hope, even though it doesn’t really feel like it at the moment, let’s talk about another page. The About page is where you will see a little excerpt I wrote about why I’m doing any of this to begin with. These first few blog posts are going to mainly be about housekeeping and such since this is a new website and everything, but eventually I will be using this part of the site to tell the story of my writing journey. From the beginnings I still don’t really like thinking about all these years later, to where I am now. I suppose I’ll eventually get to the point where I start talking about the future and stuff, but whatever, that’s not current-me’s problem.
What is current-me’s problem is part of how I had to go about launching the site, but again, I will talk about that in a little bit. For now, lets talk about the next page on my site. The projects page is the most lackluster right now I admit, but it is also the most important page I created. See, the true purpose of this site is to create a platform that will be ready to host my mainline novels when they are ready to be published, and the projects page will have a lot to do with that. For now, it simply talks about the current progress of book one, but once it’s available for purchase, that page will be a lot more involved.
The newsletter page is pretty self-explanatory, as is the My Story So Far page when you realize it’s a blog, so I don’t feel we really need to spend my time talking about them. What does need to be talked about though, is the Liravythn page.
So I have been working on this world since I was in high school, and the Liravythn page is now the official hub for that information, and as such, will be the most densely populated page, in terms of content, on this site. For the time being I have made six sub pages that can be accessed by buttons on the main page. You’ll know what I’m talking about when you see it for yourself, it’s super obvious. Anyway, now that I have mentioned the blog and the lore hub, I have finally gotten to the point of this part of the blog. Truly a Christmas miracle I know. Also, replace Christmas with your preferred holiday of choice if necessary.
Anyway, yet again, I think it is now time to explain the content release schedule you can expect from me for the foreseeable future. Things may change down the line, I mean change is the only constant in the world but anyway, I don’t plan on altering the following schedule any time soon:
Daily Updates
Youtube
Weekly Updates
Newsletter
This blog that you are miraculously still reading
The Liravythn page
Monthly Updates
I will release a new short story on the first release date of each month
Eventual Updates
The projects page
So, I haven’t spoken, or written, whatever, keeping track of this stuff in the moment is kind of annoying considering my fingers have already typed like, I don’t know, 5-10 words by the time I realize that I did the thing that doesn’t really matter all that much in the long run. But, back to the things that do matter.
Daily updates will happen daily, because if they didn’t it would be awfully strange (and factually incorrect) to call them daily updates. The weekly and monthly updates are a different story though, because, you know, they aren’t daily. Anyway, weekly and monthly updates will be posted on Sundays.
Why Sundays? Because of reasons I could think of if someone was actually asking me that right now. Fortunately, no one is asking me anything at the moment, so we’re moving on.
There are two more things I want to go over regarding the scheduling.
Earlier I wrote that the Liravythn page would be updated weekly, and while that is true, it is also an incomplete statement. For you see, while the website launched with an article in each sub-section of the Liravythn page, there will only be one new page released in one randomly decided category each week. The exception to this rule is the Short Story section, which will have only one release a month. The events that transpire in those stories are canon events to the timeline my mainline novels take place in, so they require quite a bit more thought and consideration before they are released, so you only get one per month.
Also, I’m still actively writing the mainline novels and working a full-time job in the middle of all of this, so writing even more stories on top of everything else doesn’t seem feasible at the moment.
That is actually a pretty decent segway into a topic I wasn’t really planning on talking about, but we’re here now so we might as well. Actually, I did, but it was a similar yet different kind of thing. But okay, none of that matters.
There’s one page I haven’t addressed yet and it’s related to the main thing I’ve been eluding to this entire time. The pricing plans page is where you can go and subscribe to my content releases on this site if you want. I really want to say purchasing a plan is totally optional, but sadly my hands have been tied on some things.
Firstly, my world and my words are my product, so I can’t just give them away for free.
Secondly, I discovered earlier today that I could not release my content how I initially wanted to.
You see, my plan was to launch the site, and have the first posts on every page be free to everyone forever, as a kind of sampler if you will. But, as of now, it looks like the platform I’m using to host and run the site does not allow some articles on a given page to be free while the rest are paywalled. From my current understanding, any page I want to monetize has to either be completely monetized, or completely free. I have reached out to the support team to see if there is a feature of some sort that will allow me to get around that, but for at least the time being, and probably even longer than that, I will not be able to release articles as free samplers.
So, with that being what it is, and with my goals and aspirations being what they are, the only sensible option to me at this point is to monetize every article on the pages I was already planning on monetizing. Sorry if that sucks for any of you, but it is what it is.
Speaking of things being what they are, this word count seems sufficient enough for a first post and I touched on the things I initially wanted to say, so now it’s time for me to say that it’s time for me to read this over, post it, go make a sandwich and chill with my dogs for the rest of the night.
P.S. I don’t know if bloggers have like signatures or whatever. If that’s the standard then I’m sure I’ll convince myself to do it at some point, but for now, sandwich and doggos. Later.
P.S.S. I figured out the thing with the free preview stuff I was wanting to do literally as I checked the first page on the live site to make sure things were good to go, but I also would rather write this than remove that section of the post so here we are.
