Continuing our series on Writers and Technology, Relief Advisory Board member and author J. Mark Bertrand describes why writers should have their own website.

I’m on the West Coast, chilling with a fellow writer in a coffee shop that’s far too stylish for either one of us, and he’s explaining to me the problem with publishing today.

“The problem with publishing today,” he says, “is that you can’t get a book published until you already have an audience—but how do you build an audience without a book?”

“Chicken and the egg,” I say, portentously swirling my espresso. Should my pinkie be out or not? “Vicious cycle.”

“You have to be a celebrity. You have to be professional speaker. You have to be—” his eyes narrow, “—you have to be a blogger.”

The way he says ‘blogger,’ it sounds worse than a scab busting the picket line. Like there are guys who would betray their friends, sell out their communities and hand their souls to the Man—but at least they have the self-respect, the common decency, not to blog.

Not the first time I’ve been exposed to contemptus bloggi. Usually, though, it’s coming from Old Media types quaking at the thought of pajama-clad bloggers stealing their scoops. And really, those days are gone. Now the nightly news runs YouTube clips before the break. What I’m faced with here is something else.

“I mean, maybe I should be blogging,” he says. “But I’m a novelist. I’m not gonna waste my time writing about what was on TV last night when I could be finishing a chapter of my book.”

He has a point there. Blogging is a great tool for procrastinators. I bet if I copied all my blog entries and pasted them into a Word document, there’d be a book there. A freakin’ trilogy, no doubt. But I’m not going to give up so easily. After all, I have a blog. I consider myself a writer, not a “blogger,” but let’s not get all semantical. I blog, I have advised others to blog, and I am unrepentant. Sort of . . .

Fiction Editor Alan Ackmann describes why designing a story around a moral can sometimes be a risky proposition.

My last blog mentioned that good writing does not judge its characters, and since discussion of this idea has appeared on other sites, I thought I’d make this the first in our series of common miscalculations. In Christian writing, judging characters most frequently manifests as overt moralizing on the writer’s part, so that the understanding readers are intended to take away is not of someone else’s life, but of how to live their own lives better.  The instinct to do this makes sense; God tries to tell us just what we should do, and we Christians try to comply.  Furthermore, the mostly pure intentions of Christian moralizing often amplify the instinct.  While some writers’ heritage still has a thread of “cast the sinners into the fire” fervor, most Christian stories overflow with compassion, their didacticism guiding rather condemning.  Personally, I often sense tension between my literary training (which tells me the writer should be a guiding, invisible hand, rarely sensed and never seen) and my Christian training (which practically mandates didacticism by telling me I should use my gifts to help people know God).  These two goals—one requiring absence, the other presence—seem initially irreconcilable, and I grapple with them as a writer and an editor.  As explained in a previous post, however, I ultimately gauge all aspects of fiction by their effect on characterization, which makes moralizing risky.  Here’s why: