Every writer is told to ‘build a platform’ (get your audience started) before publishing. How do you do that? Well, they’ll tell you to be active on social media and have a blog —

Great, I can do both of those.

— and have fresh content regularly.

Oh. One thing that can be hard to do is come up with topics for a blog. Harder still is finding a topic that someone else hasn’t already done better.

They say that writers should write about their process, but I find that boring and done to death. Also, I only have seven short stories published, none of which are particularly long. I don’t feel like I have a lot to say about the process, except it’s hard, much harder than it looks.

You can learn that from any writer’s twitter feed.

So other than writing, what’s in my wheel house?

Well, I did a lot of development work in education in southern and eastern Africa, which is all cool and that, but has nothing to do with this site or my professional writing.

Any audience for that material most likely would not transition to an audience for my science fiction and fantasy stories. I do write about that time in my life, but I do it at a different site (that I’m revamping. I’ll update with a link once it’s live again.).

So, limited by trying to find my target audience and build readership, I need to stay closer to my topics – aliens, space opera, astronomy as it relates to science fiction, and my reading, what can I write about that hasn’t been done to death?

Case in point: I was going to write about the Star Wars logo, just because I’d gotten to thinking about it and figured that it would make a cool blog post.

It is a cool topic. Here’s a great blog post all about it from 2013 – going into much greater detail than I had thought was possible. (There are many blog posts about this topic, but the one I linked to appears to be one of the oldest and most comprehensive.)

The thing is, I want to know this, I want to share this. This is my geekdom. So, even though I haven’t written this, I’ll read it, and read it again later. And suggest that you read it.

Because it’s cool.