Blog Questions Challenge

There's a set of questions about blogging going around which originated here and turned into a chain letter type thing, and the existence of which I was made aware by John J. Hoare the other day.

What the hell.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

It's something I'd meant to do for years, but the actual impetus was seeing Andrew Ellard asking on Twitter about an adventure gamebook he'd owned as a child, and if anyone remembered who the author was.

The book in question was one of the Horror Classic Gamebooks, The Curse of Frankenstein, and I was also able to let him know there was a second book in the series, Dracula's Castle, which I'd had as a child and still owned. This ended up with me tracking down a copy of the Frankenstein book, to which Andrew replied when I let him know this "Excellent! Please report your progress?" And so, needing a place to stick my review of them, this blog was born.

(At the time it wasn't called Ludicrously Niche, but had some placeholder name. I'm still not entirely thrilled with the name I settled on after a few more posts, but at some point the blog attracted a genuine following and I think I'm stuck with it now even if I could think of a better one. I have a vague idea I might commission an artist to design a logo depicting a literal reading niche at some point. But I haven't yet.)

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Blogger. I needed a place to quickly host a blog because of the nature of how the first post came about, and it was there. (I am available for product endorsements.)

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Some more complex posts I used to plan in Word before starting the draft on Blogger, but these days I pretty much just type directly into the dashboard.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

The answer these days is usually "when I've found something interesting in a charity shop".

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I usually let something rest for a few days after it's finished, sometimes longer. Often this is just because I prefer to publish on weekends (and sometimes have more than one post ready to go), but I do do a couple of proofreads during that time, and this approach was vindicated by the post probably going up this coming weekend where I noticed a really embarrassing mistake I'd made quite late on.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

Mostly adventure gamebooks, but also increasingly these days British humour anthology comics. A large amount of the blog does seem to revolve around 80s and 90s nostalgia.

I remember very clearly the moment I became interested in the way adventure gamebooks were engineered: in the last Sorcery! book, The Crown of Kings, there is one encounter that has two different versions depending on whether or not a character recognises you based on something that happened in the previous book, and in one version the successful ending of the scene where you get some vital information you need to progress feels a bit like it's been awkwardly bolted on later. A lot of my writing is influenced by that handful of paragraphs in a book from forty years ago.

Who are you writing for?

For the first three years the answer to this was definitely "myself", as once I'd started the blog I set myself a challenge to see if I could keep it updated weekly for as long as possible.

Remarkably, the quality of my writing has greatly improved and I've found a much wider audience since I stopped trying to keep such a target.

What's your favourite post on your blog?

I was really pleased with the trilogy of posts I did on Warlock magazine, and the 'demo' versions of full-length Fighting Fantasy books some of its early issues contained, which I published last year. For a single post, it might well be something I published just last month on the history of the interactive comic strip Cliff Hanger, a subject which so perfectly combined my two main interests it's amazing it took me so long to write about it.

I also don't think I can let this question pass without mentioning the long-lost television series from 1991 I played a big part in tracking down, and there is certainly something immensely satisfying about the post where I wrote about actually seeing it for the first time.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Probably not, although I did take a few steps towards professionalism recently by sorting out the post tags (which, having been devised early on in the blog's history, had long since become an unhelpful mess) and adding an "About" page. (You may also note I switched off the banner at the top of the page a few weeks ago, as the 'share with Facebook' and 'share with Twitter' links were annoying me. I don't suppose that counts as a redesign.)

Next?

Obviously I am far too awkward to actually suggest anyone, but any of the blog's regular readers wishing to answer these questions themselves would be most welcome.