A Confession & a Change
It’s time for a confession: the way I’ve been going about this blog has been challenging and exhausting and it makes me want to quit.
Whew. Way to finally get that off my chest! I’ve been feeling this way for a long time, but repressing that feeling by thinking about what I thought I should do and not listening to what I wanted to do was making it worse. After some conversations with friends, I’ve decided that with the start of a new year, I’m making a few changes about how I organize my online spaces which I’m hoping will overall encourage me to create more and engage more.
Starting in January, I’ll be shifting the content of this blog to focus more on my writing life and a handful of short projects. Posting will consist of one monthly post and a second semi-monthly post.
- During the first week of each month:
You’ll be treated to The Write Life, a short review of what I’ve been working on or done related to writing during the previous month and what events are coming up.
If you’ve been a patron on Patreon these last months, this will sound familiar—but fear not, the Patreon version will still be there, and will be an expanded version of what appears on this blog. So if you ever decide you want the full skinny on what I’m writing or what writing events I attend, head over to Patreon and pledge at least one dollar per month to unlock the patron-only feed. - During the third week of most months:
You’ll get to read the latest installment in a limited series. These series will include deep dives into genres or writing craft, creative ways of addressing writer support, and the return of DIY Edit (and possibly other things). Each series will be 4–6 posts, which will be collected after the series is complete and available in a pdf or other digital format.
These changes feel more natural than the rigid definition of blogging and posting I’ve been holding myself to for the last year and a half. I’m actually looking forward to blogging again and I’m especially looking forward to devoting more of my time to writing fiction in 2019.
Sounds great for you, I also need to re-evaluate my blogging also. Maybe I will take some cues from you?
In making these changes I kept my main goals in mind: (1) write more fiction and (2) be more intentional in how I spend my time. I had gotten into the habit of “falling back” to writing blog posts if I hadn’t written for the day, resulting in lazy writing I didn’t even want to share. Reconfiguring the blog has me writing something I was already writing and enjoying writing, and frees me up to worry less about the blog and more about my fiction pursuits. As long as you set your goals and create a blog plan around those goals, I think you’ll be in good shape.