how to blog by tony pierce, 110 1. write every day. 2.

if you think youre a good writer, write twice a day. 3. dont be afraid to do anything. infact if youre afraid of something, do it. then do it again. and again. 4. cuss like a sailor. 5. dont tell your mom, your work, your friends, the people you want to date, or the people you want to work for about your blog. if they find out and you'd rather they didnt read it, ask them nicely to grant you your privacy. 6. have comments. dont be upset if no one writes in your comments for a long time. eventually they'll write in there. if people start acting mean in your comments, ask them to stop, they probably will. 7. have an email address clearly displayed on your blog. sometimes people want to tell you that you rock in private. 8. dont worry very much about the design of your blog. image is a fakeout. 9. use Blogger. it's easy, it's free; and because they are owned by Google, your blog will get spidered better, you will show up in more search results, and more people will end up at your blog. besides, all the other blogging software & alternatives pretty much suck. 10. use spellcheck unless youre completely totally keeping it real. but even then you might want to use it if you think you wrote something really good. 11. say exactly what you want to say no matter what it looks like on the screen. then say something else. then keep going. and when youre done, re-read it, and edit it and hit publish and forget about it. 12. link like crazy. link anyone who links you, link your favorites, link your friends. dont be a prude. linking is what seperates bloggers from apes. and especially link if you're trying to prove a point and someone else said it first. it lends credibility even if youre full of shit. 13. if you havent written about sex, religion, and politics in a week youre probably playing it too safe, which means you probably fucked up on #5, in which case start a second blog and keep your big mouth shut about it this time. 14. remember: nobody cares which N*Sync member you are, what State you are, which Party of Five kid you are, or which Weezer song you are. the second you put one of those things on your blog you need to delete your blog and try out for the marching band.

similarilly, nobody gives a shit what the weather is like in your town, nobody wants you to change their cursor into a butterfly, nobody wants to vote on whether your blog is hot or not, and nobody gives a rat ass what song youre listening to. write something Real for you, about you, every day. 15. dont be afraid if you think something has been said before. it has. and better. big whoop. say it anyway using your own words as honestly as you can. just let it out. 16. get Site Meter and make it available for everyone to see. if you're embarrassed that not a lot of people are clicking over to your page, dont be embarrassed by the number, be embarrassed that you actually give a crap about hits to your gay blog. it really is just a blog. and hits really dont mean anything. you want Site Meter, though, to see who is linking you so you can thank them and so you can link them back. similarilly, use Technorati, but dont obsess. write. 17. people like pictures. use them. save them to your own server. or use Blogger's free service. if you dont know how to do it, learn. also get a Buzznet account. several things will happen once you start blogging, one of them is you will learn new things. thats a good thing. 18. before you hit Save as Draft or Publish Post, select all and copy your masterpiece. you are using a computer and the internet, shit can happen. no need to lose a good post. 19. push the envelope in what youre writing about and how youre saying it. be more and more honest. get to the root of things. start at the root of things and get deeper. dig. think out loud. keep typing. keep going. eventually you'll find a little treasure chest. every time you blog this can happen if you let it. 20. change your style. mimic people. write beautiful lies. dream in public. kiss and tell. finger and tell. cry scream fight sing fuck and dont be afraid to be funny. the easiest thing to do is whine when you write. dont be lazy. audblog at least once a week. 21. write open letters. make lists. call people out on their bullshit. lead by example. invent and reinvent yourself. start by writing about what happened to you today. for example today i told a hot girl how wonderfully hot she is. 22. when in doubt review something. theres not enough reviews on blogs. review a movie you just saw, a tv show, a cd, a kiss you just got, a restaurant, a hike you just took, anything. 23. constantly write about the town that you live in. 24. out yourself. tell your secrets. you can always delete them later. 25. dont use your real name. dont write about your work unless you dont care about getting fired.

26. dont be afraid to come across as an asswipe. own your asswipeness. 27. nobody likes poems. dont put your poems on your blog. not even if theyre incredible. especially if theyre incredible. odds are theyre not incredible. bad poems are funny sometimes though, so fine, put youd dumb poems on there. whatever. 28. tell us about your friends. 29. dont apologize about not blogging. nobody cares. just start blogging again. 30. read tons of blogs and leave nice comments. 31. if you're going to ripoff/mimic/be inspired by one blogger make it raymi, shes perfect. Summation of the Week Newspaper headlines

Roll over chick lit - there's a new genre in town

Bad-girl diarists are using the web to reveal their sex lives to the online world. Katy Guest and Joy Lo Dico investigate Published: 19 March 2006
'It's the good girls who keep diaries," said Tallulah Bankhead. "The bad girls don't have time." It may have been true in the 1920s, but these days bad girls are finding time to do things that would shock even Bankhead. And that includes writing them down. Abigail is a typical example of this growing breed of bad-girl diarists. Under the pseudonym "Girl with a One Track Mind", she writes about sex, work, men, Valentine's Day, cooking, sex, men and sex. Often all in the same sentence. She has just won the award for the Best British Blog at the Bloggies awards. And last year at the Frankfurt book fair, the rights to her first novel were bought by Ebury for an undisclosed sum. Abigail is one of a growing number of Women with One Track Minds who are regaling their internet audience with eye-watering sexual tales, and being snapped up by publishers quicker than you can say "S&M". When it comes to this new branch of chick-lit, Britain leads the world. They are women like the mysterious call girl Belle de Jour, whose identity became the subject of feverish speculation when her online diaries became a best-selling novel. Then there was Nedjma, an anonymous Arab woman who wrote about her sexual awakening in The Almond. Jessica Cutler came next, hitting the headlines when she was fired from her job in Capitol Hill after her weblog, Washingtonienne, detailed the sexual relations she enjoyed with colleagues. A $300,000 book deal softened the blow. And there's also the woman known only by her blog title "My Boyfriend Is a Twat" and countless others whose pseudonyms are unrepeatable here.

What Bankhead failed to anticipate was the worldwide web, where more than 50 million people now scribble away at their intimate diaries. At least half of these are estimated to be women and, judging by all the evidence, it seems that a good proportion of them are bad. Take Library Girl - why not, everybody else has. She prefers women to men, because they "are soft and have such lovely bottoms". Or Curious Pussy, who pastes pictures of smacked bottoms into her diary and writes about her enthusiastic boyfriends, Teaboy and Papi. Freya, by contrast, combines fantasies about "drinking honey from your hive" with grumpy stories of her "shitty day". "Sex-blogging is most definitely a genre," says Abigail, the Girl with a One Track Mind. "Just as there are blogs about technology or knitting, so there are blogs about people's sex lives. But whereas interest in the former may be limited, people will always have an interest in sexblogs because sex is something that affects all our lives." One person who is hoping so is the literary agent Patrick Walsh, who found Belle de Jour and turned her blog into a best-selling novel. "If you look at the nature of books that come out of blogs, like Salam Pax, or the women bloggers in Iran, you see that they are expressing something that they can't in their daily lives," he says. "There is a sense of the subversive, or the unspeakable, which applies particularly to sex but also to politics and dissidence." As well as overseeing Belle de Jour's second book, Walsh is publishing Stephanie Klein's sex diaries, Straight Up and Dirty, through Ebury Press this summer and working on turning Bruna, a Brazilian ex-hooker, into the next Belle de Jour. Not that Belle is ready to give up her Miss Online World crown. "My blog has become very boring of late," she says. "My life was significantly more outrageous before I started spending all my spare time writing!" So what is the appeal of all this sex? It is a question that hardly needs asking, according to Robert Posner, who has the dubious title of Bad Sex Co-ordinator at the Literary Review. The magazine's Bad Sex Awards were founded to punish "the embarrassing inclusion of sex scenes in otherwise literary novels", and as such he says that novels purely about sex will not be eligible. But, he says, all publishers know that sex sells. "Auberon Waugh used to say that a surefire way to sell more magazines was to put the word 'sex' in big letters in the bottom righthand corner," he chuckles. "We ran it for years. And it's much more sexy to have women revealing their thoughts about sex than men. There's a cloud over that part of women's minds and men want to know what's behind it. And women like to read about women who are just like them but with much more exciting sex lives." Rowan Pelling, the former editor of the Erotic Review, agrees. "These blogs and books contain very explicit sex that leaves nothing to the imagination," she says. "There's no element of tease; you get a lot of bang for your buck. People find it therapeutic to write it and read it. It's nice to know that you're not the only one having this or that kind of sex." "The internet has changed the way women express themselves," agrees the author of My Boyfriend Is a Twat. (To clarify, her boyfriend did challenge her to set up the blog.) "Hiding behind a monitor makes life so much easier because when the pain gets too unbearable, the monitor can simply be switched off." Abigail has been overwhelmed by the response from her readers. "I regularly get women writing to me, saying that I have helped them feel better about themselves because they connected to something I said, or that I have enabled them to have a better sex life. Getting emails like these makes me immensely proud." For a few minutes' typing a day, then, the sex blogger receives as much free therapy as she needs, an adoring audience, a huge new potential dating pool and the possibility of a book deal - and she even gets to remain anonymous. Another aphorism of Tallulah Bankhead's was: "If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner." If she had to live her life in the 21st century, no doubt she would also post her mistakes on a blog.

The ups and downs of an active sex life Freya's House of Dreams http://freyashouse.blog spot.com/ "Through every forest, above the trees within my stomach, scraped off my knees i drink the honey inside your hive you are the reason i stay alive" Moving up, I straddle your body. My hair slides down and curtains our faces. It's just the two of us. Leaning down I brush my lips across yours softly and then move back. I reach down and pull the flogger, a coil of rope and a paddle from the floor below. They're in your view and I raise an eyebrow in your direction. "Let's see if you're as tough as all that talk, shall we?" ... A brief break from the vacation story. I had a supremely shitty day yesterday. One of those days where you are rocking and then read an email and you find yourself crying. Something you hope for and it nearly happens but then doesn't and it feels like the end of the world ... Girl with a One Track Mind http://girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/ Because I write about sex, people often ask me: what makes a man a good lover? Whilst I don't profess to know the answer to this - if I did, I'd be rich surely ... I have however, built up a vast knowledge in this subject. In other words: I have fucked a lot of men. Seriously. I have. The amount is irrelevant. Let's just assume many. QUEENS OF THE SEX BLOG GIRL WITH A ONE TRACK MIND Who: Abby Lee, a woman in her thirties who lives in north London. What's it about? Diary of a sex fiend. Quote: "I regularly get women writing to me thanking me for my honesty and upfrontness about sex, saying that I have helped them feel better about themselves." BELLE DE JOUR Who: Author of Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl. Given up job in sex trade now and has "straitlaced, grown-up" new career. What's it about? Diary of a London call girl. Quote: "It's easier to write about revealing subjects when your boundaries are well defined, and on the internet, as the old joke goes, no one knows you're a dog."

WASHINGTONIENNE Who: Jessica Cutler, 27, a former intern for the Republican Party. What's it about? X-rated online accounts of her sexual encounters with other Republican staffers before she was found out and sacked. Quote: "Now bloggers have more or less collectively determined that we all have the right to our anonymity." MY BOY-FRIEND IS A TWAT Who: Briton Zoe McCarthy lives in Belgium with her three kids and her boyfriend. What's it about? Boyfriend urged her to start her own blog. She writes humourously on all aspects of life. Quote: "I have yet to find a man who can write properly about sex and relationships. Their brain isn't in the right place."