Greetings, men, women, and nonbinary companions…allow me to do the blogger’s walk of shame as I reflect on what I’ve done. I said I’d get a blog post out every week this October and…I guess that meant full weeks? Honestly, I have no idea what exactly I meant with that, but the point is, I missed last week, and I didn’t post like I was supposed to. Hypothetically, I could’ve posted. I have four whole paragraphs of partially-started blog post that was intended to be finished in time for the first Saturday of October at the latest. I even still have the almost-fully-drafted blog post that I decided not to post all those centuries ago, the one that was good but didn’t quite feel right, and I didn’t even post that. What am I doing with my life?
Let me let you in on a little secret:
I barely like blogging. Most of the time, I find blogging to be tedious and unrewarding, really only good for venting my feelings into the void where no one will so much as notice them. This blog shows me time and time again that the only things I’m able to commit to are caring for my cat, working at my day job, and working on my Series In Progress, everything else is superfluous fluff. It’s not that I don’t care about you dear reader of my blog, possible Facebook friend, or one of my (*checks Twitter*) two Twitter followers that could disappear at anytime, it’s just that I can’t see you. I don’t know you’re there, and I’m not sure I’m putting out anything of value, so this blog gets neglected.
Whenever I neglect this blog or anything else involving my barely-existent platform, I feel bad about it, and maybe having a blogging readership that would complain if I didn’t upload would just make it worse, but I can’t keep doing this the way that I am. I talk big game of vamping up this blog to make it something more fun and interesting for me, but any attempt at revamping takes a level of time and energy that I clearly don’t have if I can’t so much as maintain this blog in its current form.
There’s a more important reason I started blogging:
I started blogging for money. It sounds crass, but what is an audience beyond people who like your stuff enough to consume it regularly? Having a blog with regular followers would mean I could monetize my blog, and maybe start working a few less hours at my day job, meaning more time to write books and feed the blog. I don’t have an audience on here, at least none that makes itself known, probably because I don’t post regularly and that the only ‘advertising’ I’ve ever done for this blog was in a self-promo thread on Facebook that I participated in sometime during the winter. It’s fall, now.
I’d probably be more keen on advertising this blog if I knew there would be regular decent to great content on here to get eyes on, but I don’t produce regular content in part because no one’s got their eyes on me, but I could get their eyes on me by advertising it and…it’s a vicious cycle. Next month will mark a full year of me doing this thing, how much longer can I do this before I throw in the towel and declare this blog a failed experiment? How much longer can I do this before I just turn this website into a place with a home page that displays not the recent blog posts, but simply advertises my WIPs as ‘coming soon’ (meaning no earlier than five years from now, if I’m being optimistic), with a less front-and-center blog that updates occasionally when I feel like journaling publicly?
Authors need websites and social media and I do not have the passion or the skillset to maintain either of those things. Why am I here when I could be binge-watching YouTube blissfully unaware of how quickly I pick up short-lived passion projects only for those projects to die the moment I lose interest? I love writing books and I believe I can finish and publish them without throwing them out the moment I get temporarily interested in other things. I’ve already written the classic first draft of what will become Trilogy One, spent several months transposing and fleshing it out, spent the better part of a year working (cluelessly) on its second draft, then realized it was still broken, outlined half of its original scenes, killed my darlings for Amber (Book 1 ∆), made a new outline for Amber, and I’m currently rewriting it. I’ve drafted Trilogy Two and started editing it awhile ago, although editing more will have to wait until after Trilogy One is rewritten into three parts. I’ve got detailed plans (both in mind and in writing) for Trilogy Three, and Halloween is giving me violent and gory ideas for Trilogy Four (the prequels) which makes me (non-sexually) excited. I can focus on books.
I can focus on books for almost five years straight and be able to see myself still ride-or-die committed to those same books five years (maybe ten years) after the fact. I can’t maintain an author platform, but I can still become an author…but, will anyone ever see my books if I can’t maintain a platform? No matter how good my advertising will be for the actual books, will I really have the loyal readership needed to make Books 2 – 12 sell after Book 1 has been finished? What if I’m just not good enough…
Part 42 of Writer Has An Existential Crisis:
For those of you not in the know, there is no “Writer Has An Existential Crisis” series of blogs on this website, I just have a tendency to slip into existential crises when I think too hard about how poorly managed my platform is and how I feel doomed to failure. It’s weird that I feel that way, because I regularly talk and act as if I’m already this big name author (whatever that means, most famous authors aren’t even “famous”) or at least I’ll become one in the next decade. I can’t be both a soon-to-be-recognized genius and a scatterbrained fool who really shouldn’t be allowed to make big plans that don’t involve my cat, my day job, and/or the writing/editing part of being an author. I’m just being hard on myself because my self-esteem fluctuates just like anyone else’s.
I don’t like how trying to build a platform is going and I don’t want to keep trying right now. This will be the only blog post for this month, I am too out of sorts to try and write another one. I’m sorry 😔. You’ll definitely hear from me when the books come out and probably sporadically before then, but I cannot maintain this thing with where I am today.
Goodbye for now, it was nice knowing you.