So, in the middle
of December, last year, I suddenly stopped posting on this blog. Absolutely
nothing for over 3 months. I basically avoided any updates on Facebook,
although there were a few drive-by snippets here and there. I didn’t throw
anything out on Twitter, although, to be fair, I never really got invested in
the Twitter thing. (There’s something about the 160-character thing that just
irks and inhibits me.) My Pinterest boards went silent, I apparently stopped
perusing books according to Goodreads, and Google Plus became Google Minus.
Last month, the
silence on this blog was briefly broken, with three half-ass posts, not my
best, then the tumbleweeds started rolling again. I essentially went AWOL from
social media, and I gave no reason why. But today, with the arrival of a
certain something in the mail, I decided it was time to chat a little bit about
what’s been going on.
Despite the
concerns expressed by a few people who emailed me privately, I did not go into
a depression. Rather, I went into a distraction. Two of them, actually. My
creative juices did not dry up. Instead, the juices were squeezed into
different containers than this one.
The first
container was one of my other blogs, “Backup Dancers From Hell”. At some point
late last year, something I did, or perhaps something someone else did, caused
a huge spike in hits on that blog. I went from an average of less than a
hundred hits a day to over a thousand a day. And the spike held strong,
continuing for weeks. It eventually abated somewhat, but I still regularly get
500-600 hits a day.
Granted, an
analysis of hits is rather mundane and boring for people who aren’t writing an
actual blog. But if you are a blogger,
any time you see a spike, you do the best you can to recreate or reinforce
whatever caused that activity. Trouble is, I couldn’t figure out what was
causing all the commotion, what might be
the source of the influx, because the tallies of hits on the individual posts
did not add up to the overall total that Blogger was reporting for that site. And I still haven’t figured it out, even after
I went to the Blogger IT people. They were just as flummoxed as me about the
discrepancy, but they confirmed that the overall total was a valid and
wonderful thing.
Hmm.
Bottom line,
something or somebody somewhere was paying attention to that blog. And the only
way to guarantee the attention was to keep posting. So I have been. Which means
less time for this blog.
The bigger
container for my juices (that sounds a bit naughty, but I’m keeping the phrase
anyway) had two fundamental ingredients. The first was the abysmally low number of hits for this blog. Although I like ALL of my
blogs, at least those that are still active, this one is my pride and joy. This
is where I have the most fun, where I don’t limit myself, and where you can get
the truest glimpse into what I’m really trying to do. But nobody was coming to
visit, despite my promotional efforts on social media.
And that’s
ingredient number two, social media. I had been spending an enormous amount of
time on the various outlets, from Facebook to Pinterest to lesser-known
vehicles that might generate some visits, especially repeat visits, which is
crucial, to my blogs. Yes, some of my time, especially on Facebook, was purely
social in nature and I do enjoy that angle, but a big chunk of my efforts were
concentrated on the business side.
And it really is
a business, for me. I love writing, don’t get me wrong, if The Fates decree
that I am never to earn a penny from my writing, so be it, I will still
continue. But I would like to earn some pennies from it, many pennies, to be
blunt. I would like it to be my career. Scratch that, I dream nightly about it being my career. It’s the one thing I’ve
always wanted, since day one when I first composed a sentence as a young child
and thought, wow, that felt really good. More, please.
But we all face obstacles
when approaching fervent goals, and mine
are currently these: I have a soul-sucking day job that takes up a tremendous
amount of time. (And most of us do, I realize, I’m just listing my grievances
to present a better case in court.) I’ve been spending a lot of time on social
media promoting my material, instead of producing
my material. (And as I’ve mentioned, that promoting doesn’t seem to be getting
anywhere.) And I have a tendency, on this blog, to create hugely-epic,
multi-part posts that only attract my few hard-core readers. (The average
visitor drops into the middle of this mess, immediately gets confused about
what is going on, and leaves.)
Those are the
lesser-evils. The biggest impediment? My using the above excuses to justify and
explain why I’m not getting anywhere with this blogging thing. It was time for
me to suck it up, get real, and do what I’ve always wanted to do, which is
write books. The blogs are fine and
dandy, for what they are, and I’ve had many fine moments where I’m
overwhelmingly proud of what I’ve done, even if only my hard-core readers pay
any attention.
So that’s what I’m
going to do, write actual books. More importantly, I’m actually doing something
about it instead of just wishing and hoping. I’ve started on the first book (in
this decade anyway, more on that later) and things seem to be going okay. It’s
a reworking of the “Paris Chronicles” series from this very blog, which
originally ran at the tail-end of 2009. I’m chopping and shifting and adding
and subtracting bits of those 52 posts so that they read in a smoother narrative
flow, so that it proceeds like an actual novel and not something that was
invented on the fly, as it was, one post at a time.
Why revisit something
that I’ve already done? Why plunder that which was once writ? Well, because I
think it’s worth the recycling, and the opportunity to revisit “old friends”
has been rather fun, both the good (“oh, I like what I did there”) and the bad (“holy
cow, that sucked”). Over the years and all the various blogs, I’ve amassed a
huge number of posts. If you lay them out end to end, you probably couldn’t
circle the world, but by sheer odds alone there’s going to be a nugget or two
worthy of rescue.
To put it another
way, here’s an excerpt from what is now the opening chapter of Screaming in Paris, a working title that
suits me now but is obviously subject to change. In this bit, I address those
well-intentioned folks who ask why I’ve never written a book…
In the years
since, as my blog-work wandered through a range of stories and experiments
(some efforts producing pieces of which I’m proud, other efforts calling into
question the severity of my alcohol intake), there was one thing which remained
constant: People were always asking me when I was going to “write a book”.
(Because, as the snooty authors with actual “hard-cover” trophies on the mantel
loved to point out, a blogger just isn’t a “real” writer, he’s only playing in
his own little sandbox.)
But the truth
is, I have written a book. Three of them, many years ago. None of them were
exceptionally brilliant, and all of them were soundly (and probably wisely)
rejected by publishing houses back in the day. (The first effort no longer exists,
the worn pages having been lost at some point as I moved between houses and
cities and states. I believe there might be a copy of the second manuscript in
a box in the attic, but I haven’t tried to find it in years, fearing that it,
too, may have joined its older sibling next to a manual typewriter in the sky.
The third and last child is neatly tucked in a cardboard box and shoved to the
back of a shawdowy, rarely-used drawer in my desk, patiently waiting for me to
love it again.
There was a
dark period where I wrote very little, a lost decade or two, running in place
and even slipping back down the stairs from time to time. But I never stopped
paying attention, observing, filing away images that planted seeds, quietly
distilling a new approach to my writing. And then this magical concept of
“blogging” came along, a new playing field where you can get real-time reaction
from readers, and you realize rather quickly whether or not an experiment is
working. My seeds now had plenty of water, I just had to keep fertilizing them.
My farm, over
time, exploded. At one point I had nine separate blogs, each constructed around
completely different concepts, using various writing styles. The years of
pent-up non-expression came pouring out of me, two or three posts a day. I
don’t think my fingers ever stopped moving in 2010 and 2011. It was a glorious,
wonderful release. But there was a potential price. “You’ve got to slow down,”
warned my more-seasoned blogger friends. “You’ll burn yourself out, you’ll get
all cranky, and people won’t invite you out for cocktails anymore.”
And they were
right, of course. The little engine that could can only cover so much track
before the scenery starts to get a little too familiar. I transferred my engine
to a smaller network of tracks, one with fewer departures and a more relaxed
schedule, and I spent some time reviewing the logs to see just where my train
had been.
My overgrown garden
is now full of thousands and thousands of pages. Bits of this, long stretches
of that, weird snapshots of whatever, planted hither and yon. THERE are my
books, the new and preferably better ones, the books I actually have been
writing during the years when people thought I was just playing. It’s time to
get out my trowels and shovels and pruning shears and, yes, the dreaded axe,
harvesting the good stuff and sadly sending the not-so-tasty produce to the
compost heap so they can help feed next season’s crop.
And there you
have it, a snippet of the future, at least for me, one wherein I focus on
writing books and not so much on my blogs. There’s a bit of pain with that,
because I like the immediate response of comments on my posts. But it’s clear
at this point that I’m not doing whatever is necessary for the blogs to become
a source of income. I can’t keep pointing fingers and hoping for something
magical. I have to take concrete steps.
And one of those
firm steps involves what I hinted at earlier, the arrival of something in the
mail this morning. This package contained finalized documents between me and
the county of Dallas, state of Texas. Officially, I am now a publishing
company, Bonnywood Manor. (A name
which should come as no surprise if you have followed me for any length of
time.) It cost me a little bit of money to do so, not overwhelming, but still,
it would certainly cover the tab of several consecutive happy hours at my fave
restaurant, Ojeda’s.
What does this
mean? It means that I can retain complete ownership of anything that I publish,
and that seems rather important to me even if it really isn’t in the long run.
It also means that, someday, once I’ve figured out the hazy maze of getting
things published, I have an umbrella to hold up, where I can reach out to
others who type endlessly into the night and dream during the day, and help
them share what I hope to share. Baby steps now, strong strides later.
But first I have
to finish my first/fourth book, make it festive and enticing. Which means,
somewhat sadly but also encouragingly, that this blog will transition. I’ll
still be using this site to post original material, especially when I need
input on tricky bits where I’m needing critical insight. But it won’t be what
it once was, which was a repository for my literary whims. Instead, it will
become a sounding board as I reflect on life, liberty, the pursuit of
publication, and a never-ending quest to find the perfect queso to compliment a
margarita.
Or, as some
purists will say, it will become an actual blog,
a hitching post for what is happening in my life. This scares me a little bit,
because I have a tendency to hide the real me from the spotlight, after years
of being misunderstood and defaulting myself into obscurity. I initially named
this blog “The Sound and the Fury” for a reason. I’m going back to that reason,
and I hope you’ll join me.
But there will
always be my stories, either here or somewhere else, that I promise.
Stay tuned.
Please.
