So Peggey the Editor also picked up Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded by John Freakin’ Scalzi the other day and I’ve been peeking in and reading snippets of it while it’s been sitting on the kitchen table. As expected, it’s a great collection of his blog entries since the Paleolithic Age. Really, he started blogging in 1998. Most of you weren’t even out of grade school yet.

I have to admit, I admire Scalzi. He’s not your typical SF writer. Hell, he’s not even your typical writer. He has a sharp business sense (I borrow my business sense from Scott De la Mancha His Holy Trinity the Third, or SIII) and is an extremely witty man. He rolls with Hollywood celebrities (well, okay, former celebrities… Wil Wheaton is known more for his blogging now than his awesome role as Wesley Crusher on ST:TNG) and has a great family. His first novel, Old Man’s War, is on my short list for most influential books of the century. So what if the century is still young?

So… where am I going with this? Where was I going with this, anyways?

*scrolls back up and reads*

Oooooh… that’s right.

More writers should blog. Really. One of the worst things we get is “blocked”. It’s the frustrating time when, no matter what you try, nothing creative is coming out. Or worse still, everything they write is crap. EVERYTHING. IS. CRAP.

That’s where I’m at right now, by the way.

But a blog lets you just… let go, purge your system of those craptastic ideas and whatnot while you blissfully b.s. your way through an entry. People come by and read your b.s. and think “This is what writers do all day?”. You get to write about what you want, how you want, and the only thing you get is either hate mail or comments regarding your sanity. You do it how you want it and not how everyone else wants it. In short, you get to go back to that first novel, before it sold, and say “I can play by whatever rules I want, as long as I keep it consistent!”.

Ah, the good old days.

I think I touched on it yesterday, but one of the things I do once I’ve moved on with sequels is to go back and decipher some of my notes. I have one sequel to Corruptor already written (Obliterator) and another three outlined (Vindicator, Devastator, Liberator). One more is rattling around in the back of my head, but I’m not sure if that one will do much. I’ve had Gargoyle return in them, new villains (Tesseract, The Wizard, Gloom) pop up, new heroes (Nick) and old heroes (Tori and Dylan). But…

I have to keep the rules straight. And in that I’m having issues.

You see, Vindicator kicks off six months after Corruptor. That is too much time between events at the end of Corruptor, in my head. But realistically, a lot of the changes I have to happen should take longer. But… too much time and I lose a bit of the story I feel. In the gaming industry, two years is an eternity. The same can be said of The Warp. But I’m stuck, and blogging helps.

I wonder just how many other writers (and those others, the ones who write “literature”) blog and, if not, do they realize just how valuable of a tool they’re ignoring?