Introducing Scott Bury, my guest this week on the tour

This week our blogs are writing we would post on our own blogs. Scott describes our assignment below:

A normal blog post

This week’s assignment is to write a “normal” blog post as an introduction to my blog. 

Whenever I hear the word “normal,” I have to ask: what is “normal”? Who’s normal? Do you know anyone who is completely normal? I don’t.

Take writers. There cannot be a normal writer, because writing books and stories is not something people normally do. A minority of the population attempts to write a novel, and an even smaller minority of them actually finish one. Of those, a fraction publish it. What’s the word from high school? Oh, yah: infinitesimal.

My blog: Written Words

And that takes care of the first part of Tasha Turner’s instructions for Week 3: introducing the blog. My blog is called Written Words, and I try to focus every post on just that: words that have been written down.

My first intention was to draw attention to my former career as a freelance writer of all sorts of material. I thought I could lambaste examples of bad writing that I found, or misleading words from the news, advertising and entertainment. For a while I did that, but I did not blog very frequently. In fact, there were whole years without posts.

I started getting more serious about blogging last summer, when I was about to publish my first fiction. I blogged about my writing and publishing experience, and about using my new iPad to write and blog while travelling. I also started reviewing books.

If you take a look at Written Words now, you’ll find posts on a range of subjects. First, there are critiques of communication from other sources that I find objectionable in some way—such as John Edwards’ self-serving statement of responsibility.

I also post writing tips based on common errors I find—like misusing quotation marks, over-capitalizing and overloading sentences.

And there are book reviews. Now, I try to review only independent authors’ work. After all, the authors signed to big publishers have enough support.

I also try to do guest blog swaps with other bloggers—something similar to what Tasha has organized in this blog tour. I have asked writers from RS Guthrie to Alan McDermott to Roger Eschbacher (that’s quite a sweep of genres and styles) to tell my readers about the best thing they’ve ever done as writers or for their writing, and the worst thing. I give them the freedom to look at any part of writing, whether it’s content (no one has written about that, yet), the writing process, their publishing experience or promotion. The result is always interesting.

And then there are times when I write about something else. Hey, it’s my blog. I can write about whatever I want. They’re still “written words.”

Come on over. See for yourself, and leave a comment or two. I love getting comments.

Scott Bury is a journalist, editor and writer living in Ottawa. His articles have been published in newspapers and magazines in Canada, the US, UK and Australia.

The Bones of the Earth is his first novel to be published.

He has two sons, an orange cat and a loving wife who puts up with a lot. You can read more of Scott’s writing at Written Words and Scott’s Travel Blog, and on his website, The Written Word. Follow him on Twitter @ScottTheWriter.