New bloggers and new blogs on a sunny October day

One of my favourite ways to spend a Saturday, I have to admit, is running my one-day blogging course for UWA Extension. I know, it’s not exactly cool to love working on the weekend but it is honestly just heaps of fun to meet a dozen or more bloggers-to-be and turn them into published bloggers by the end of the day.

New bloggers working hard

So as you might guess, today was another one of those days. I was trying to count how often I’ve run this course in the past two and a half years and this might have been the tenth time, I’m not sure! I feel like we should have had cake! Of course, we did have some chocolate to keep us going, although of all the bloggers I’ve met, these ones liked chocolate the least. Which is not such a terrible thing because it means I have a couple left over to munch on while I write this post.

Every group of new bloggers is different – last time, for example, a big proportion of them were planning to blog for very specific business-related reasons. This time was different again and we had a number of aspiring novelists, people with passions to share and a couple of business bloggers with some fun ideas. It was also interesting that we had lots of bloggers come in pairs – two sisters, an aunt and nephew and an aunt and niece – I love the idea of keeping blogging in the family!

View from lunch

What impressed me even more was that as well as not wasting precious minutes eating chocolate, this group were by far the most conscientious I’ve ever had. Despite enjoying this amazing view over lunch, they all raced back as soon as their last mouthful was done and got straight back onto their blogs again, writing their About pages or fiddling with their design. I have a good feeling that a large number of today’s new bloggers will still be blogging in a few months’ time.

Without further ado, let me introduce some of our brave new bloggers:

• Suburbhen (definitely prize for the cleverest and coolest name!)
• The Purple Crayon (a personal favourite for me because it’s about children’s books, among other things)
• Moving out of the Mansion (hilarious, from our only teenage blogger today)
• The Blushing Phantom (fascinating – from a future novelist)
• Life at 50 Something (I don’t need this yet, but …)
• Why Do We Have To (may generate some controversy – gotta love that!)
• Does the Shoe Fit … (the Imelda Marcos of the blog world)
• Susan’s Bookcase (interested in a book club? Look here!)