To find instant success overnight, there are ten things that you MUST do to drive viewers to your blog! Here are the:

Top Ten Ways To Drive Traffic to your Speculative Fiction Blog

Write your story as a top ten list. Don’t make your paragraphs more than two lines long. The average reader cannot read more than that. Stop your paragraph at the end of the line even if Remember: STORY must be CHARACTER driven; the characters’ arcs should correspond with the THREE-ACT structure; the three-act structure is delimited by THEME; theme arises organically from STORY. If you follow this easily understood formula, your story will be successful beyond your wildest dreams. Come up with a catchy title like “A Billionaire Dinosaur forced me gay.” Who knows? If the title is captivating enough, you won’t even have to write the novel. One sure fire way to build interest in your ANTAGONIST is to introduce him or her while in the process of doing something out of character for a diabolical mastermind, like making a soup or cleaning a pool. Have them make some sort of vague analogy between their action and the running of a criminal empire. For example:

“My father taught me how to clean pools,” Mr. Masterson said, as he swirled the net around in the clear blue water. “There’s a fine line between too acidic and too basal. If the Ph is too low, you scald your eyes. If it’s too high, the job doesn’t get done.” His right hand man, Shorty Tootall, swallowed nothing hard as Mr. Masterson turned his cool, blue eyes on him. “What do you think, Shorty? Is something out of balance here?”

Because analogy, metaphor, and allegory is always used by the villain, make sure your PROTAGONIST speaks in the manner of the village explainer, down-home and without guile. String him (or her) up by his ankles and when the leering villain regales him with his plans for the future, have him (or her) blather with unblinking conviction: “I swear by all I hold holy, I will hunt you down and kill you.” To which the villain chortles breezily, clashing his long nailed hands together. Related to #6: Avoid irony, farce and satire. They belong to yesteryear. They do not transfer well to the Internet. Related to #7: Keep in mind that the blogosphere has more in common with the cocaine-fueled optimism of Hollywood than the hard-boiled, booze-soused, gloomy, tell-truth-to-power ethos of the traditional novelist. Write accordingly. Related to #8: Do not be overly critical of other writers even if their writing sucks. They are trying and they should be praised endlessly for trying. Writing is not a business, wherein if you lose money over and over again you are fired, or baseball, wherein after launching ball after ball into the stands behind home plate you are taken out of batting rotation. Writing is a subjective endeavor and the more you mollycoddle other people’s attempts, the more they will “like” you and “friend” you. This is known as the Paris Hilton effect: lowering the bar provides a scale upon which anyone’s mediocre attempts can be judged. If all else fails, change your blog to a blog about how to increase traffic to your blog.

*Disclaimer: this post is satire.

Happy Holidays from all of me here at “The Speculative Fiction of William Gosline”