Want to be famous and trendy on the Internet? Join the personal publishing era - get blogging.

Weblogs are part scrapbook, part magazine, part journal, part soapbox, part obligation and part fantasy. Anything that can be typed on a computer keyboard or made into a digital file (images, sounds and scanned items) can be part of a weblog. People (bloggers) with a scanner or digital camera can include pictures of themselves and the objects they write about. Links to other websites are what really make a weblog a digital twist to the old fashioned scrapbook. The best weblogs are those with well-written journal content, interesting links and an eye catching design.

However, don't get the idea that weblogs (blogs) are just another personal home page. News and commercial sites use them too. Blogging software makes updating simple and quick. Just open the program, add your content and click. Automatically the software puts your entry into HTML, sets up the navigation (layout, date, etc.), and publishes it to your website.

Some blog software will have more features. Movable Type is very popular but not simple to install. Blogger.com is simple but unreliable due to high use. As a new blogger, you need something easy to use with dependable technical support. Almost all blog software is free for personal use.

There is a group online called GTA Bloggers, for people with weblogs in the Toronto area. Join the email list or read the website if you need help, inspiration, ideas or just want to chat with other bloggers. I also found a webring for Ontario bloggers. Take a look online for blogging groups in your own area.

Have you ever tried writing exercises? Some are pretty simple but not so effective. Now and then I find one that makes you 'need' to write. There is no way for you to resist writing. Those are the best kind. Who writes those?

Writing exercises from HerCorner.com:

Try this: Pretend you are a gossip columnist. Write about a recent personal encounter. Don't use any names of people, places or things. How does that change your writing? Make you more aware of who, what, why, when and where?

Try this: Think of a place you feel passionate about, somewhere you have been often, whether its your favourite bookstore, garden or town. Now, write a journal about the trip. Include all the details like how it sounds, smells, your favourite spot or thing, where you found free parking, where's the best view? Tell someone else all about your place, as if they were going there themselves.

Try this: Create a character with a secret to confess. Write their journal entries over the days, weeks, months they keep the secret. Show how it effects themselves, the people around them and why they continue to keep the secret.

Try this: Practice paraphrasing. Take a large block of quoted text and pare it down to the bare essentials. This is a great skill to have for interviews or your own writing (if you tend to be wordy).

Try this: Find a newspaper article you feel passionate about and write a letter to the editor. Write as if you are going to send it in to be published, think carefully of each of your points, make sure the style is professional and then actually send it in.

Try this: Write a letter to one of your ancestors, someone you have never met but have heard something about. Or make up an ancestor. Tell them all about yourself, who you are, what makes you the person you are.

Try this: Write a letter to someone from another planet. Tell them about life on Earth. Describe everything to someone who may not know what air is, who has never heard of the fast food concept, etc.

Try this: Write out your favourite joke (or fairy tale or poem). Then rewrite that narrative as a tragedy, as a limerick, as a haiku, as a serious academic treatise, as a breaking news story, or as the script for a music video.

Try this: Eavesdrop on a conversation, capture a snippet of it in your mind. Write a story or scene using dialogue only. Since every scene in every story should contain conflict, you'll want to keep this key concept in mind.

Try this: Watch something happen in public and remember what it was. Try and remember everything and write about it in detail.

Try this: Do a full character analysis. Create a real person: how they walk, the colours they like, who they most admire, where their family came from, their Mother's maiden name, do they have a zit today and so on.

Try this: Your character is suddenly blinded and danger still abounds. Focus on those senses you might normally neglect when writing.

Try this: Design three tools, inventions, or customs for your science fiction or fantasy world.

Try this: In five hundred words or less, choose a superstition or old wives' tale and describe how a character of your design came to learn it and/or who the character first remembers teaching it to him/her.

Try this: Choose a favourite fable, fairy tale or literary story. Pick a character (not the main characters) and tell the story through his or her eyes in five hundred words or less.

Try this: Write a poem describing the colour red to someone who has been blind from birth. Keep in mind, this person has never seen the typical things like fire, the sun, etc which you could use as a comparison. If poetry isn't your thing, write in prose but try to be lyrical.

Try this: Pick out your favourite tape or CD and put it on. Sing a long, dance, pretend you are one of the backup singers or the singer herself. Put energy into it and go wild. Dress up like a rock star, grab a make-shift microphone and sing out loud. When you feel charged up write something.

Try this: Write about a dream, real or imagined. Be vivid. Dreams tend to jump around since they don't have to make sense or be guided by rules of time and space.

Try this: Get away from your usual writing place. Go outside, get a coffee at the local diner, sit in your car and write. You may find it hard to adapt to the change but it could bring you all new perspectives.

Try this: Verbs make the world go round. With that in mind write a story where the characters are running out of time or involved in an extreme sport. Keep the action sharp and crisp with verbs.

Try this: Try a short word challenge. Write a short story using only words that have six letters or less. Really great practice at keeping it simple for anyone who tends to use ten dollar words when a 10 cent word would work just as well.

How well do you know the grammar rules? Some people seem to think breaking the rules of grammar and punctuation is a way to rebel against society, rules and so on and so forth. Some, I guess, think they are being trendy and keeping up with the modern Internet ideas. Personally, I think it just makes their writing look careless and messy.

As a reader I strongly feel anyone not putting some care into their writing is not someone I will invest my time in. It's not my way of being a snob. It's just that, if you have something to say, chances are you want to say it well and make sure its understood. I can accept bad grammar in a personal rant, something written more for yourself than public consumption. Or, if you are writing to a whole group of people who have made the same grammar and punctuation choices, as a rule. For the rest of us, that whole communication process: from your mind, onto that blank page and into their mind, has a few rules to make it all run smoothly and work better.

In the end, I just say why not? Why not use grammar and punctuation? It's been around awhile, outlasted many generations of rebels, eccentrics and writers in general. Unless you come up with something that works better why change something that obviously works. A style of writing that has lasted through the ages and will likely still be here for generations to come. Not everything we write is going to stand the test of time, there is just too much of it and not enough eager readers. Whatever does last, will have to stand up to the accepted standards. Personal rants full of grammar and punctuation errors might not be taken as seriously as writing carefully crafted for both content and context.

If modern medicine keeps working on the cure for aging we might all still be here to see what future generations write about, using that same old fashioned grammar.

Note: I don't claim to have perfect grammar, punctuation or spelling. But I do run it by Lotus Word. I still have the final say, the last word and the best chance to leave in some of my bad writing examples.

Deadline!

Did that scare you? Well, it scares me. Not to the extent that my hair is turning white... well, not all at once. But enough that I feel the pressure to procrastinate.

How do you procrastinate? I tend to play computer games. At least it keeps me in the right area, if not very focused. Sometimes I snap out of it, grab ahold of myself and tell myself (sternly) that this is not a good thing. Most of the time I begin planning my article then. Being stern with myself seems to give me inspiration.

I think most of us come to a point where we have to force ourselves to write. For whatever your own personal reasons are, its not easy to create something out of an idea and a blank page. You aren't going to feel that orgasm of inspiration and lust to write for each and every article you work on. Or you might reach a point where you don't have more to say about a topic you write about frequently.

How do you get new ideas, new angles? Try procrastinating, but in a good way. Read the newspaper, take a walk outside and see what you come up with. Sometimes all it really takes in combining ideas. While you are outside you see a few birds and think about how birds often fly into buildings. Could that be a new article for your architecture column? Or a new fiction story about what drives birds or doesn't drive them? Its up to you to twist things around and put them into print. Just don't procrastinate too long, you've got that blood thirsty deadline, remember?

Today, there are 65 subscribers to this newsletter. Are you all crazy? I'm a fraud, I couldn't tell you how to write your way out of a paper bag even if I had a map. Just ask my family.

First, they say something that feels like a polite, supportive pat on the head. But they top it with the qualifier. The qualifier is not a good thing, its something about not making money, not having perfect grammar, the typo they found in the odd article they actually did read, etc, and so on. Do people give you qualifiers?

Rejection from some editor is one thing. But, its not personal. Family and friends are another thing. How can that not be personal. Likely, they mean well. I know mine do. But each qualifier is like a mountain I have to climb out from under. For a moment I'm suffocating, buried alive under more earth than I could dig my way out from. Not so different from my nephew's quest in the backyard, that hole to China he starts again, every Fall, in the garden.

But, you do have to keep digging. Keep trying and keep your eye on your goals, your passions and your reasons for wanting to write. Maybe you just write for yourself. But secretly you want to take the next step, its just hard to believe you really can. After all your spelling isn't that great, the stuff you write about is boring and your grammar is as good as mine.

Welcome to the club, now get writing.