1.  Clear 20 minutes from your schedule. You can be waiting in your car, sitting at home or in a coffee house, but you need to be comfortable and not distracted by a phone, MP3 player or other yakking.

2. Smile. This clues your body into the fact that daydreaming is good. The silence in your head will make you uncomfortable, and you'll start to create to-do lists or engage in negative self-talk.

3. Deliberately unhook your mind. Imagine yourself with a remote and turn off your to-do list, your schedule, your emails, and all your other action-connections.

4.. When a distracting thought pops up, look at it, imagine yourself sliding it into a plastic bag, closing it up and putting it down, while saying, “Not now.” All your panicky ideas will be there when you are done.

5. Close your eyes if you are too distracted by your surroundings. Imagine yourself in a room that is beautiful. There is a door in the room. You are curious about it.

6. Walk over to the door. Listen to your footsteps. The room smells good. It’s just the right temperature.

7. Open the door. Wait. There may be nothing at the door. Except opportunity to daydream. Keep waiting. Not the impatient waiting for someone to get to your meeting. Not the panicky waiting of the doctor’s office call to tell you the result of the test. The waiting of waking up and wondering what it’s like outside. The waiting to unwrap a present.

8. Keep waiting. If you have not allowed yourself to daydream before, nothing may happen this time. Daydreaming is a skill, like not falling off the Stairmaster or knowing how to fold paper butterflies.  The longer you wait, the better you get.

When you get to the point where waiting is restful instead of stressful, you have stepped onto the road of daydream.  It happens differently for each person. Maybe you see a green bean walk into a bar, and you wonder if it is a perfume or a novel. Maybe a fat old woman walks into the room and you love her and don’t know why.

Opening the door to imagination is not automatic. We no longer learn it at school. It is strongly discouraged at work. We didn’t notice it was missing from our lives until we noticed our lives were routine, focused around work, and we were angry and tense more often than happy and content. What’s missing is daydreaming. It is an honorable and necessary experience for joy and satisfaction.
 
(c) 2006-9. Quinn McDonald. No part of this may be reproduced in any way without express permission of QuinnCreative.

Here are some simple tips to help you write a good blog and attract an audience.
1. Use a blog host; it's easier than to build a blog into your website.  A blog host is a company like Blogger, Typepad, or  WordPress that lets you create a blog separately from your website. (I've listed three. There are many more.) You concentrate on the writing, the blog host concentrates on the formatting, publication and getting you read through RSS feeds.

2. Make it easy for your readers. Choose a blog host that's easy for you to work with so you can make it easy for your readers to find topics they want to read about.  I like WordPress. Some charge, some are free. "Free" is not why I moved to WordPress--I like the choices I get with WordPress. I could help my readers find what they wanted in different ways--by date, topic, most popular post.

3. Have a goal for your blog. Do you want to drive traffic to your website? Rant? Develop a daily writing, video or photo practice? Having a clear goal helps you know what to post and what to put in a "save for later" file.

4. Post regularly. Every time you post, your host notifies the search engines. The more you post, the more your site gets updated on search engines. A good rule of thumb is to post three times a week, 300 words to a post.

5. Use images. People like to see an image when they get to a post. A post that is long and dense makes readers skim and miss your meaning. Images provide emotional connection and impact on a blog.

6. Name your images. When you give your images a title, your title is available for searching, too. Skipping the title, using a number or just calling it "image," "chart," or "graph," doesn't get searched for as often.

7. Your blog is not private. Even if you password protect it, it will leak into some search engine. If you want to write down your secret, dark thoughts, use pencil and paper and lock them in a safe. What goes on your blog may wind up in your employee folder.  Don't want it there? Don't run it.

8. Think before you post. Once your blog goes out over feeds, your opinion is there for all to see. Consider the future: would you want a potential employer to know all this about you? Your mom? Your date (before s/he falls madly in love with you?) Yes, you are entitled to your opinions.But your potential boss, lover, or mother-in-law is also trolling your opinions. There are consequences.

9. Don't get even. Recently broke up? Angry at your roommate? Don't dump it all out on your blog. It might feel good for a few minutes, but then there is the cleanup. It's hard to pull back opinions. You might get back together, and then you'll have 'splainin' to do, Lucy. And a big, loud, angry rant about someone's faults often says more about you, your tolerance, your inability to deal well with your anger and your issues than about the person you are writing about.

Writing for a blog isn't hard. Writing good articles for a blog is hard. And so is writing good stuff consistently.

Not everyone is a writer, and not everyone wants a daily writing practice.But once you've written about the ideas at the front of your mind, how do you continue? Here are 8 ways.

1. Pick something you know a lot about. Like to cook? You can go on forever with recipes, cooking tips, cookbook reviews. Car engines, animals, anything you know about can form the foundation of your blog. Write what you know.

2. Write down your ideas. As soon as you have them. You have a great idea, and your attention shifts, and the idea vanishes. The shortest pencil beats the longest memory. A pen, pencil, and an index card, or small spiral notebook will help you remember the idea. So will a small device to record your thoughts.

3. Add book & music reviews. Even if you are a recognized experts, others have great ideas. Feel free to review books, movies, music and collect links to share. People love to explore, and you can help them expand their knowledge by giving them shortcuts to more information.

4. Create a tutorial. People like to participate. Whether you know how to knit, rebuild a car engine, or know a better way to wax skis, have someone take pictures of you doing it and describe it. A tutorial blog is a wonderful thing to people who want to learn by doing. One caution: if you are not an expert at writing instructions, have someone read your blog and follow the steps to make sure it's clear.

5. Illustrate your idea or story. Pictures and illustrations help others understand how you did something. They also help you keep your writing short.

6. Interview a friend. Tired of writing on your topic? Interview another expert and use that as a blog. A different voice is always a nice break, and more information is interesting.

7. Have a guest write for you. I've found great articles by others and, after asking permission, posted a summary on my blog and linked to the whole article.  Everyone's happy--you don't have to reinvent every idea, someone else gets linked to a topic, readers love finding out that you have answers. Ask the person whose blog you are going to summarize. Their work is under copyright, so you can't "borrow," take, steal, or quote extensively without permission.

8. Create a list of links. This is quite useful to others. You surf so your readers don't have to.  You'll be surprised how posting links makes you the expert. And once you are the go-to person, people come back to your blog again and again.

© Quinn McDonald, 2006-9. All rights reserved.