Hey, welcome to all my first time visitors. Carlos (from Conscious Me) asked me to host the discussion for the big Pre-Writing Challenge, so feel free to dive right in.
Feel free to start new threads within the forum, but to kick us off I've created this one for general discussion about the Challenge, a thread for you to easily submit your site information, and a third dedicated to links to relevant information. Check back on these three regularly.
Welcome everyone, and thank you Aaron for getting this set up. This will be a good place for us to chat and compare notes, update each other, ask questions, etc. in more than 140 characters. You can sign up for the RSS feed to make things automatic as we tend to love. So, who's got something to say? Anybody get started on their first extra draft yet?
I have an idea for a post for everyone, and I am sweetening the pot for this challenge.
Idea: I suggest that everyone write a post as a review of this whole experience. You can get started on it now and add to it throughout the challenge. It would be awesome if we ended up with a different perspective from everyone on this deal. That might be the biggest thing that sends spreads the traffic love after it's all said and done. I think your readers would be really interested in hearing about your experience, and then curious to read some of the other experiences that were had in the challenge.
Here's some open ended questions to get you thinking that you can use to help you write the post. Use any, all, or none of them as you so desire:
1. What was your initial reaction to the challenge?
2. How did your feelings change after the idea settled in?
3. How effective was the sign up process and communication leading up to the start of the challenge? What would have made you feel more informed and excited about the challenge?
5. How effective was the promotional process for the challenge? How could we have brought more attention to the challenge and had more sign-ups?
6. How did you feel sitting down to your first go at writing an extra draft? Excited/Overwhelmed by the challenge? How did that change after you put pen to paper, or rather, fingertips to keyboard?
7. What was it like having a group of writers, a good portion of them strangers, working along side you on this project? How do you perceive the group interactions during the process?
8. What could have been done differently to encourage more peer interaction in the challenge?
9. What kind of reaction did you get from your readers throughout the challenge, and how do you expect they'll respond to your completion of it?
10. What did you contribute to the challenge itself? What ideas did you have, or what work did you do beyond writing your posts?
11. What would it take to get you to do this challenge again? What would have to be different?
12. What were the top 3 benefits or positive experiences you had because of the challenge?
13. What did you learn about yourself because of the experience?
14. How have you changed?
I encourage you to leave additional questions below that might inspire some unique writing on the subject.
The Sweet Part: The first 4 people that leave a response below committing to writing this post can have it published on Conscious Me as a guest post in addition to publishing it on your own site. Everyone else who writes one of these can give me the link and a 100 or so word teaser for it and I'll publish them as a list post to wrap things up. I will spread these out over 3 weeks after the challenge is complete.
Hey Carlos, I'm in...
*Note: I want you guys to talk about the entire experience. Therefore, the deadline for this post will be 2 days AFTER the end of the challenge to give you a chance to add any last thoughts after the challenge is over. If you're one of the first 4 people to commit (like Bert did, thanks Bert!) you must have this submitted to me within 2 days or I will go on to number 5 (so even if you're not in the first 4, go ahead and sign up, there's still a chance to get in).
David Doolin has lost his mind! He's selling a limited amount of his 52 page ebook for $5. Get one immediately before they're gone. Read about and buy it here.
I propose we officially launch on Friday Feb 19, at 12:01am in whatever time zone we each live in, and end on Sunday March 21, 11:59pm. This is exactly 31 days (1 month) of blogging, and timed to include 2 weekends which I thought might be when some of us will get a lot of this extra writing done.
It also will have given us 1 week to think up, create, organize, prepare, and promote the event which seems like a reasonable amount of time without waiting too long and losing our enthusiasm.
Hopefully it will also give Doolin some time to win the technical war he's battling at WIAW.
Any objections or suggestions?
Sounds achievable. Looking forward to getting started.
That's fair enough...
Anyone know the basic px dimensions for a blog header, and how do I get a gravatar for my profile? I emailed carlos my site stuff and bio, well i gotta get on writing...
Sounds good to me. I've got some notes on topics and such, but can use the week for the final details (like the Page :) ).
I'm really excited about all the different ways people are using this challenge.
Doolin is using it to knock out a series on PHP in wordpress.
Justin is using it to dig out some old promising bits of work and breathe life into them.
Bert is writing a beginners guide to blogging.
Deacon and Dustin are using it as an opportunity to start increasing their posting frequency.
Aaron is mapping out the next 6 weeks of his blog schedule in a cohesive, linear structure.
You guys are incredible and inspiring. Way to take this thing and run with it!
Okay guys, now that the first few days are over, who's having a difficult time with this? I'm sure some of us have not gotten off to a strong start and that's okay. Let us know what what you're struggling with and maybe we can help. If nothing else, getting it off your chest will help.
If you really don't want to post it here, you can email me too. carlos at conscious me .com
Mine's going well. Not so much that everyone should start hating me for being weirdly successful, but the way I decided to do things forced me to make a posting schedule for the first time since I started the blog, and that has been incredibly valuable to me.
It makes working ahead low-stress, because I have a dozen posts already titled and waiting for content, so I can just pick one that piques my interest at the moment, and add a couple paragraphs. Before that, I had to work on one article at a time, and the task could get monumental.
I'm already having more fun with my blogging, because of this project. Thanks for putting so much time and energy into it, Carlos, or I never would have. You rock.
haha! I always hate you for your success. No, that's awesome! I'm glad you're in this. I think your approach to it is really going to help you with building pillar content, though pretty much everything you write is pillar content, you genius fool.
My success with this challenge as been... relatively good. I've gotten some great ideas for posts (for violetminded and beyond) and a couple of drafts under my belt. Let's see if I can keep this up.
I decided that I needed to look at this challenge as the entire 6 weeks of writing (18 posts) rather than just the 2 weeks of pre-writing (6 posts) otherwise I would be so focused on the 6 post topics I'd forget to think of things for the others. So this is where I stand on all of them.
I have, at least, an idea for something like 13-15 of the 18 posts. Three are now in draft format (fully written and linked, waiting for editing and finalizing), and three have either been posted or are already scheduled to post.
I've written at least two of the six around midnight when I should be in bed - or at least not working. I just can't stop writing! Although, I imagine there's a good chance I'll crash and burn in about three days :).
Yours,
Megan
I emailed this to Carlos before I remembered the forum. Duh.
As for my challenge week one, I have my 10 post ideas and some notes on most of them. I have started one in draft and I am going to try to crank out 1 or 2 tonight. My goal for this challenge is to write posts that would be regular features on my site. I want to be able to choose one when I need to post without worry that it is timed or topical. I guess that is pillar content but I am not focusing on a very specific niche. There have been some tough days that I could use posts like that and that is what I am going to write!
As Carlos has pointed out, it's been my goal to work through the next six weeks (or, five now) of posts during the course of this challenge, so I'll end the month with two more weeks finished.
Given that, I haven't made great progress on my eight challenge posts. I've written one to completion, and done good descriptions on the other seven. I have gotten nine of the next twelve posts done, though -- so I should be rolling right into the challenge posts early this week.
Evening all :)
Just a quick note to say hello. Carlos has very kindly agreed to allow me to join the challenge, albeit a week late. I'll head over to the relevant place and add my bio details etc. in a moment but I just wanted to first say hello and thank you in advance for allowing me to play too. I look forward to getting to know you folks :)
Hey gang. I just did an additional pre-writing updates post (in addition to the "challenge page": http://zemalf.com/1297/pre-writing-challenge-updates/
I'll be updating that and putting my updates, thoughts and notes in there - and added links to all of you as well (let me know if I'm missing someone).
Carlos - I'll be doing the kind of review you asked - especially since you so helpfully made all those questions to make it easy :)
Thanks for jumping on that review post, Antti! I hope you guys will have had a great experience, and also have some helpful critiques that I can put towards future endeavors.
That leaves 1 more spot for a guest post on Conscious Me reviewing the Challenge. Any takers?
If any of you have completely missed what I'm talking about here, read this comment I submitted a while back to get the details on my offer.
I don't know if you're already counting me, but I'm in. I've got mine done and scheduled to go live over the weekend (when I don't have any blog posts scheduled). If you'd like to see a preview, let me know.
Hell yes, I'd love to see a preview! Give it to me!
You can check it out here:
http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/2010/my-experience-with-the-conscious-me-pre-writing-challenge/?preview=true&preview_id=476&preview_nonce=98b1286ecf
At least, I think you can. I have no idea how portable preview links are. If that doesn't work, you can always log in and preview it yourself.
Be warned, though: it's long. Halfway through the challenge, it's already 2400 words. I can't help myself.
you need a plugin to display previews publicly...it's called Public Post Preview. When you have a draft, it gives you a link somewhere down below your your main text box.
OK then, that fills out our 4 review guest posts on Conscious Me, but I would encourage each of you to write your own and publish it. After a month of talking about the challenge, I think your readers would appreciate it, and you'll still get some links from me.
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