Learning to WordPress

I came to WordPress.com after my WordPress.org blog died in flames and malware smoke on my own server. I thought I pretty much knew how to use WordPress as a whole, and I’ve let the blog coast for several years. Life was busy and I didn’t have time to fool around with blog stuff.

Anyway, this past week, I actually bothered to grab the WordPress app on my phone so I could update my blog on the fly. As I was clicking on stuff, I happened to look at my stats. They pretty much tabulate the rise and fall of social media, where most of my hits came from.

Stats for my sad little blog over its lifetime

As you can see, I moved to wordpress.com in 2015. I update about once a week, or every two weeks, whenever I have something to share. After 2017, you begin to see the social media sites throttling outside traffic. I used to get comments on my blog posts. I forgot what that’s like. Actual people used to visit my blog and say things and for heavens sake, sometimes disagree with me.

My art used to bring in a ton of search results from Google. Google doesn’t like people to use the image search anymore, so that dried up. So now my poor blog sits here with a vast archive and no visitors. People say blogging is dead? Only because social media and the algorithms killed it.

Being the type to never say die, I was poking around in my shiny new app, and discovered the Reader button. It lets you follow blogs, and search for new ones. I started doing that. Lo and behold, I found a whole secret ecosystem of WordPress blogs. They’re interconnected. They share traffic. Some of them get comments.

The trick is the tagging system. WordPress doesn’t make this easy for you. They give you a general idea on their Help section, but they don’t give you a list of categories, except a handful of very broad ones to start. This blog would fall under “art” and “writing” and “creativity”. But thousands of blogs get posted to those categories every day. You’re supposed to use tags to describe your content in a more granular way. My artwork might also be “painting” “illustration” “fanart” “science fiction” “fantasy” and you see the trouble. WordPress’s ecosystem isn’t that big. There’s no way to target the exact readers I want unless I hunt them on social media. And social media hates blogs. Unless it’s Tumblr.

And if you have books to sell? Pff, you’re on your own, buster. Nobody wants to read a story unless it’s a fanfic and it’s free oh and it has the correct ship.

Please don’t make me explain what a ship is.

The point is, I’m going to start experimenting with bringing the ol’ blog in line with Teh Modern Internets. I’m going to repost some of my more popular posts with updated tags and categories. I’m going to try to figure out how to get my artwork onto the search engines. (Better descriptive text? I have to figure this out.) If you see smoke and ashes flying from this blog’s direction, don’t be alarmed. That’s just me, relearning how to blog.

Anybody else out there trying to cope with Teh Modern Internets? If you have tips for me, let me know. I’m woefully behind.

More fantastic girl artwork

You know, since I started doing this series of girls, I’ve gotten more commission requests than I ever have before. I guess people like pretty girls, huh?

People like midriffs and cleavage. Do you know what is also really hard to draw? Yes.

I was going more for ‘cute’ than ‘sexy’ with this one. There’s this one Spiderman comic book artwork by J. Scott Campbell that people either love or hate, so I used the pose here. I’m nowhere near Campbell’s level, so it was good practice.

This one became a tiny comic by accident, mostly so I could explain why this character is suddenly rocking a coat with all the fluff. Drawn mostly for the coat.

And this one, which is telling a story of a dramatic, lightning-powered rescue.

Since I started posting these, I’ve gotten so much positive feedback, and commission requests, and nice karma in general. I’m just over here trying to improve my skills, and people like it. It also helps that my brain is finally coming back after having two babies back to back. I can actually envision action scenes again.

Two weeks until we move, then I can open up for commissions again once we’re settled. 🙂

Drawing more girls plus fight scene

Been trying to make more art lately, try out new techniques! I’ve also had to rip back my last book and rewrite the last third of it. I took a hard look and it just … had to happen. But the new stuff is coming along, bit by bit. Readers will be so glad I did this to the book. They might actually enjoy it. :-p

My personal challenge to draw more girls continues:

Except I have to sneak cute guys in there sometimes. This is Max and Sorrel. Sorrel was in an accident and has road rash scars on her face and neck. Max thinks she’s beautiful anyway.

This one is very purple. This is Lethia Marr Dasa, a voidmage who can rip the life force out of people. When she first got her powers, she hated them and thought she was evil and broken.

Action scene from a fanfic. I wanted to try out the angled perspective with a hero and a villain, and I like the way it came out. Inching ever closer to being able to make my books into graphic novels.

Armored gal

I spent most of the week working on the cover for my next book, but I’m not ready to show that off yet. So have a pretty gal in armor:

I was trying a new tutorial for shading and I liked the way it turned out. But I wanted it to be shinier, so I’m going to try that with my next attempt. Also, my Discord voted that I need to draw more pretty girls, so I’m working on that.

That’s pretty much all I got to do this week. The baby has decided to not sleep during my morning art time, due to the sun rising earlier. So … less art time means less art. :-p