To be honest, only one author's online work-related blog stands out in my mind and that is the blog of Laurell K Hamilton which is rapidly losing her fans as she lets whatever she is thinking just flood out into cyberspace. However, when compared with Kelley Armstrong, who writes the same genre, she just appears to be a rank amateur. Perhaps blogging isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sure it's a way to get feedback, to connect with fans but if it ends up losing you your market, maybe you should pack it in?

And I think that is exactly the approach that should be taken.

I mean, one shouldn't complain that the fans know more about the characters than she does if one lets the cats eat one's only set of notes, i.e. the post-its above her computer. Isn't that akin to announcing you're having an affair with your postman's wife? *grin*

Although, I have to admit, her blog does serve a really good purpose. A newbie writers guide to how not to start the writing process.

I bought "Southern Fire" entirely as a result of your blogging here and what you had to say on Writer's Dock. It was my first experience of your writing and I've already been heartily recommending it to all and sundry.

I read Neil Gaiman's blog a lot- one of the only ones I go out of my way to read- because it's interesting and honest and funny and gives real insight into an interesting life.

One writer's blog which is a model of how to do it is Holly Lisle's. She calls it a 'Writing Diary' and it is mostly taken up with the progress she is or is not making with her current projects. There are other things, too and she posts almost daily. She is also a one-woman marketing team for her fiction writing offshoots online. Her industry is quite amazing, that she has the time to maintain that blog on an almost daily basis (and at one point she was doing podcasts in response to budding writers' questions, too) while writing a new book and redrafting another.

Most of the fantasy writers I have enjoyed recently have very little activity on their websites or their blogs. No doubt because they are busy writing their novels!

The pitfalls of getting involved in too much blogging for someone trying to write a book are equally telling. Something I have experienced. I considered what is now yesterday (it being past midnight here in the UK as I type this) a waste, really, because I wrote no fiction. I basically wrote myself out with blog posts I would have done well to leave alone. (The irony of posting this now does not escape me.)

There is also another pitfall, too. One of the most informed and lively forums devoted to fantasy (centring on Martin's work - who is yet another fairly infrequent blogger) namely Westeros, has fantasy novelists, as here, posting to threads.

Scott Lynch (who can do no wrong there) Joe Abercrombie (much the same), Brian Ruckley and Brandon Sanderson have all posted there. Now it is only a matter of time before fans start to tell you what you are doing wrong and what they didn't like and make suggestions as to how you can improve things. All well and good, but it can only be bad news in the process of writing the book: that book is nobody's, but nobody's business except the person writing it. And when it is done and - miraculously - out there, no matter what the reader will make of it, what the writer meant and made of it, is again his or her business alone. It is someone else peeing in the clear pool of a individual creative process.

Scott Lynch doesn't seem to be on Westeros much now, if at all, as well as a couple of other forums he posted to. He did say something about that in a recent interview - but I can't remember what! Perhaps that it discolours his clear pool, too. The other writers I mentioned have posted on Westeros in the past few days. As a mere mortal poster I don't post there any more after a run-in which left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. The vox-pop nature of many forums - including one generally as excellent as Westeros is rife with underpants philosophers. (See my last Live Journal entry to get the sense of that!) One hopes Brandon Sanderson is thick-skinned enough to cope with a derisive and dismissive comment on one of his books directly below a friendly post he made to illuminate a few questions. But why subject yourself to the possibility in the first place?

I would, if push comes to shove, prefer the writer to graft out another quality addition to a sequence in virtual silence than to be online all the time, popping up in fan forums - because it is presumably 'all about the fans'. Actually it is not. All it is about is writing that book. As best as you can. And that is nobody's business but the writer doing it. His or her vision. Singular.

Ted Hughes was asked why he never said anything, for almost 20 years, about his relationship with Sylvia Plath when at one point he was being accused in some quarters of virtual murder. Eventually, he did speak, as all artists should, with their art, in The Birthday Letters. But he also said that, were he have spoken at the time, his voice would have simply become one more voice in the babel of voices and end up with no more authority (about an experience only lived by him and Sylvia Plath) than all those other voices.

I see similar pitfalls in blogging and forum threading for a writer. Published and unpublished. If it serves a constructive purpose, I suppose all well and good. But I know I have only got so much jam to spread on my bread!