Writing takes so many forms, but I think many lessons are more universal than we know.
The Benefits of Joining a Blog Community
Blogging, or any form of writing, is an act of one. You are alone with your thoughts, your words, and your preferred way to write. It’s easy to think you’re the only one thinking your obscene thoughts or telling those kinds of smutty stories.
In fact, there’s an entire community of other sex bloggers and erotic writers doing what you do. There are multiple benefits to joining the community once you find it.
Immediate Readers
When you share your existing or brand-new blog in community spaces, you’re almost guaranteed a few immediate readers. Maybe not many, but a few. This can be a great feeling when you see your stats jump from a few views in a day to a dozen or more. The more active a community, the more potential clicks to your site once you join in.
Once those readers arrive, whether they’re fellow bloggers or new-to-you readers, hopefully, your other blog posts will keep them coming back. But the boost of knowing someone is reading your work might be what you need to keep going.
Potential Feedback and Comments
Back in the day, blog readers loved to leave comments. It was a great way to interact, get to know each other, and let someone know how a post resonated with them. These days, comments are rare. People skim a blog post and jump away as soon as they’re done, even when they loved the story.
While there’s no guarantee of a comment when you join the blogging community — like through a link-up or blog meme — they’re a lot more common. In fact, some of your best feedback may come from other bloggers who share their own personal stories or comment on how your writing makes them feel.
Reminder That You’re Not Alone
Writing and blogging can feel like a solitary endeavor. In many ways it is. It requires you, your keyboard, and your imagination. When you blog about sex, it’s easy to think you’re the only person who’s ever done this or the only person who can relate to how you feel.
The power of a good blogging community is that it reminds us how not-alone we really are. Knowing that others are out there struggling in similar ways can be encouraging because it’s not “just you” going through it. Knowing that others write about sex, even in different ways, can help normalize the feeling of writing sexy stories or about sex.
No Community is Perfect
Communities are made of people, and people are imperfect. You will find bloggers who disagree with you. You will meet bloggers who hold views you find abhorrent. This is true even in communities centered around sexual content. Many of us work hard to raise awareness, educate others, and make our communities better places for everyone. But sometimes we don’t get along or agree.
You don’t have to love the entire blogging community to find your people and place within it. You can build your own little circle of friends from the larger community once you meet people you click with. That circle can fulfill the function of the wider community — providing readers and fans, feedback and comments, and reminders that you’re not alone.
Looking for a Community to Join?
Every prompt workbook from Obscene Ideas offers its own little community — a link-up centered around the book and topic. Whether you purchase one book or all of them, you can share your blog posts, read others’ work, and get to know other writers who used the same prompts you did. Along the way, you’ll get to know people and find your own circle of friends and fellow bloggers.
Buy 31 Days of Erotic Fiction, use it for blog content, and then join the link-up and the community!
31 Days of Erotic Fiction Community
Kayla Lords is a freelance sex writer, podcaster, blogger, and all-around sex content creating human. As a writer, she focuses on sex and kink primarily on BDSM and power exchange. She works with private clients to write their content and manage their social media, while also co-hosting two podcasts, running a YouTube channel, and managing multiple blogs. Let’s just say, she stays busy and wants to keep it that way.
Kayla is an international speaker and an award-winning sex blogger. She believes we are stronger together as a community than we are isolated and apart.
Blog your NaNoWriMo
Have you always wanted to do NaNoWriMo but for some reason or other talked yourself out of it?
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one out there who has done this. More than once too. Every year I contemplate it and every year I decide that I don’t have enough of a fully fleshed out idea to tackle it. And I also think, “What about my blog during that time?” After all there are only so many hours in the day.
But what if you could combine the two: create content for your blog and do NaNoWriMo, or least a version of it? Sound tempting?
Do it with us
One of the reasons we decided to launch this project with series of fiction prompts was because we thought it would be the ideal answer for those people who had always wanted to do NaNoWriMo but didn’t have an idea for a book.
By using the 31 Days of Erotic Fiction you can write a short story for every day of the month. If you are a blogger then you can also post those stories to your blog giving you a whole month of content. And as we all know content is king when it comes to blogging so why not blog your NaNoWriMo?
The Numbers
At the end of the month you will have a 31 pieces of flash fiction to your name. If you write 500 words for each story, by the time you finish you will have written 15,500 thousands words. You could potentially use those flash fiction pieces as the basis for a longer story or maybe turn one into the plot for your next novel which you could write during NaNoWriMo 2021.
You can also share your work with us here as we have created a link up page where you can post a link your 31 Days of Fiction blog posts so that we and other bloggers completing the workbook can read your work.
Make it work for you
If you want to register on the NaNoWriMo site then you can absolutely do that too however to “win” you will need to write average of 1,667 words per day to hit the target of 50,000 words at the end of the month. The difference though is that they suggest you don’t do any editing along the way. You just get the words down. Clearly if you want to blog your stories you are probably going to want to do some proofreading/editing before doing so, hence aiming for a slightly lower word count. But if you think you can do 1667 words a day using the prompts then don’t let us stop you.
Challenge yourself
We believe just because you don’t have a novel in you (yet) doesn’t mean you shouldn’t join in with NaNoWriMo and hope that the 31 Days of Erotic Fiction will provide you with a alternative way to take on the challenge of a writing month whether it be in November or any other month you choose to do it in.
Molly Moore runs her own freelance business. Working for various companies managing blogs, social media and affiliate programs. She is also the author of Mollysdailykiss.com where she blogs about sex, kink and self portrait photography.
How to start a (sex) blog
The title says it all and the sex is in brackets because really this post applies to setting up any blog but when it comes to how to start a sex blog there are some extra things you need to think about.