My Top-Secret Writing Blog and Why Every Writer Should Have One

Among my many blogs and internet accounts is one blog nobody but me can read--- my private writing blog. Here I put my various writing efforts such as chapters from the novels I'm writing. Since the blog is set to allow only the blog author to read the posts, it is completely private.

Why do I do this? One reason lies in a bit of advice mentioned by Jerry B. Jenkins in his book 'Writing for the Soul'--- someday, every computer is going to die. If you are unlucky, some of your files will die with it. We all know we are supposed to back up our work, but we may not do so often enough.

Jenkins suggests emailing your chapters to yourself, and this is a fairly good idea, provided you can put the emails in a folder where you can find them again. But a private blog works well also, and has the advantage that you can sort your writing with tags and thus find what you are looking for more easily. I tag each post with the form of the writing--- 'novel' for a novel chapter, and 'notes' or 'outline' for those kinds of files. Then I create a tag for each individual work--- 'gems-of-kolbe' for any chapters, notes or outlines pertaining to my novel-in-progress Gems of Kolbe. Clicking on a tag in the tag list on the side of the blog brings up all posts with that tag.

Another reason to use a private blog is that then you can easily work on your writing at different computers. When I am at my mother's house and she is watching a chick flick that I don't care for, I go to her computer and work on my novel.

My third reason for using this method is a personal one. I write far more often in blogs than I do working on my writing on my word processing program. The blog format seems more friendly to me. So this way I can work on the novel and have it seem like blogging.

I also save copies of my work on my home computer, of course. I'll need to have an electronic copy of the whole work when I go in search of publishers. But my private blog gives me the security of having a back-up copy in a different location from my computer. I used to worry sometimes--- what would happen if a house fire or a burglary took not only my computer, but my back-up disks? Now I don't have to worry about that any more.

Not all blog host allow private blogs. My first private writing blog was on Livejournal since at the time Blogger didn't have that option. Now that Blogger does, I've started a private blog there since that is where I keep all my public blogs, not to mention my cat's blog. Blogger is very easy to use, and now has a feature to easily change your layout. This is how I added a list of my tags (labels) to the blog. To set your writing blog to private, go to the 'permissions' tab under 'Settings' and choose to make your blog available only to the author. It's that simple.

How secure is a private blog? I don't know, but I imagine if you are a top writer like Patricia Cornwell there is a chance you might be hacked. The same goes if you email your writing to yourself and store it online that way. The best thing to do if you worry about hackers is to use a blog host for your private blog that you don't use for public blogs, and to have a username and a password that are obscure mixes of numbers and letters.

My private blog makes my writing life both easier and more secure. That's why I believe that every writer may wish to have a top-secret writing blog of their own.