As I start out on creating my blog site, I am surprised by the amount of information available on the internet about blogging. Not to mention the numerous blogging sites. It really seems a daunting task to compete will all the hundreds, if not thousands, of people blogging about the same or similar topics as me. So how do I make myself stand out?

One of the first pieces of advice I was given when I started writing was "Write what you know." A very valuable piece of advice. Twenty years ago when I started writing, to me that meant that I was very limited in what I wrote about.

Today, with sites such as wikipedia.org and Google, you're no longer restricted to simply write what you know. If you don't know it, research it and find out.

Case in point: When I wrote my first draft of The Fourth Portal, I needed one of my characters to explain how a microscope works. Set a few hundred years into the future, Character A was an engineer used to computer scanners that provided a three-dimensional, interactive representation with the capability to enlarge images too small to see with the naked eye. Character B, on the other hand, was a technology collector, collecting instruments dating back to the early 20th century. One of these included a microscope. Having never before seen a microscope, Character A had to be told how a microscope worked.

So where to start?

Well, it seems I've finally been convinced to join the blogging world. Not to mention at the suggestion of a very good friend of mine.

So, you might ask, what took me so long?

Procrastination, I guess. And the heavy burden of blogging regularly. Let's face it, we're all busy people. (Okay, some of us are.) So where to find the time between life, work and all the stuff that happens in between?