This is a Blog written by myself, Ian Fenwick, the founder of Write Time Freelance Writers. I want to make this site a valuable resource, not only for my customers old and new, but for all budding writers out there in their lonely realms. I will try to offer any advice or free fiction tips that i find interesting, and I welcome comments and feedback. Please do feel free to contact me about the blog or anything else pertaining to the website. I like to network with people, in particular other writers.
I may also post previously unpublished articles and review on here from time to time. This can sometimes be because i couldn't find a market for them, but usually they're just my own ramblings that were probably never meant to see the light of day!
Postmodern American literature has endured many definitions and undergone many profound changes. Raymond Carver is only one of a significant number of writeres that have embarked upon a change in direction, instigaed by their dissatisfaction with their contemporaries and predecessors; a change in literary reaction to a Postmodern American Culture.
Bill Buford, editor of the British literary magazine Granta, indentified this breed of writers, including names like: Richard Ford, Jayne Ann Phillips and Tobis Wolff to name a few, and he dumped them all together in an issue called Dirty Realism.
Although the title of the volume is a little unappreciative of the writing, implying a very generic and somwhat thematic connection, he does correctly identify some of their shared characteristics.
He says:
...these strange stories: unadorned, unfurnished, low-rent tragedies about people who watch day-time television, read cheap romances or listen to country and western music. They are waitresses in roadside cafes, cashiers in supermarkets, construction workers, secretaries and unemployed cowboys... They are from Kentucky or Alabama or Oregon, but, mainly they could just about be from anywhere: drifters in a world cluttered with junk food and the oppressive details of modern consumerism... The sentences are stripped of adornment... it is what's not being said - the silences, the elisions, the omissions - that seems to speak most.
How To are running a pretty good competition at the moment folks. You see they're looking for new writers and I thought it would be nice to mention them here, and also give you all a chance to get your work seen.
It's an article writing competition, and on top of any money the article makes you, the winner will also receive £200!
The following work is part of a study I have been interested in for some time now and I have covered it at many levels.
Looking at the short stories of Raymond Carver and other similar writers I argue that a distinct second wave of postmodernist writers from the late 1970s though the 1980s revived a type of neo-realism due to their dissatisfaction with their predecessors and their inability to comprehend postmodern American culture.
Raymond Carver is an instigating force behind the movement and he creates hyperreal short stories primarily as a reaction to the unsatisfactory representations of reality (unreality) offered by his metafictional predecessors and contemporaries.
As you read the following blog posts you will see how I undertake a close examination of key thinkers of the postmodern period and refer to some of their seminal studies in postmodern theory. In order to demonstrate what is acheived by Carver's hyperreal fiction, and how it is acheived, these include Jean Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition and Jean Baudrilard's Simulacra and Simulation.
Also included are some examples of other, key hyperreal short story writers in order to demonstrate a definite 'school' of thought. I will conclude (eventually) by bringing these stories together with the postmodern theories in order to posit a moral question about the significance and effects of such literature in relation to contemporary society. I will also conclude by arguing that more can be acheived, causing less alienation of the reader, by mirroring social structures and human nature, rather than examining the inadequacies of linguistic and representational structures.
Well, it's like this really, if you blog once a week then you'll be doing alright, but if you blog twice a week you'll do better. There really isnt' anything more complicated about it than that really - the more the better.
However, what you do need to remember is that it's all about your keyword content (read previous post), and if you don't have the right keywords in your blog post, or if the relevance isn't there, then you may as well not bother.
When I say relevance I mean that if you have a blog about cat food and then you write a blog post about model tanks then that post is not likely to help you with your ranking because it's unlikely to have anything in the content relating to cats. You need to keep your posts about what you're selling; and let's face it, everyone's selling something aren't they? Otherwise, what's the point in having a blog?
Personally, if you're starting out with an affiliate blog then I would advise posting twice a week, with about 200-300 words with relevant, keyword rich content. This should start you off nicely. Then you need to build links etc; but this is a post for another day.
Blogging is all about the keyword content isn't it? And if you didn't know this then it's about time you did.
If you have an affiliate blog (which means you're trying to sell something for someone else and get paid) then you need to examine the product or service that you're selling.
In order to get people to your blog in order to sell, you need to concentrate on the keywords required to do so. The keywords are the words and phrases that people would type into their chosen search engine to look for you.
If you sell cat food online then one of your key phrases would be "cat food online", or perhaps "buy online cat food" Now if you have this phrase written enough throughout your blog you will come close to the top of the search results.
I'll go more into this at a later date, but in the meantime if you want any more information about blogging and how I can help maximise your sales contact me.
