Let us be honest; I am not the most reliable of people. Oh, I’ve got your back if you’re in trouble, and I meet most of my deadlines at work, but I forget things, I’m bad with dates/names/financial details, I get distracted easily and I pretty much suck at making regular commitments.
Case in point, this new blog.
The reality of blogging, especially blogging about writing, especially especially blogging about writing because you want people to go out and spend modest amounts of money on your work, is that you have to produce posts worth reading, and you have to produce them pretty often. I could go into a bit of a rant about that, and I might just do that another day, but let’s take it as a given that I need to be pumping out the wordcount fairly regularly and move on.
(Chuck Wendig, of course, has written on the topic of writerly blogging, much as he writes every fucking day like clockwork on his annoyingly excellent blog Terrible Minds. But I’m pretty sure Chuck steals the adrenaline glands of medical cadavers and sucks them down like pimentos. No other fucking explanation for his prodigious output.)
The problem with that, of course, is the one-two punch of thinking up things worth saying and writing them down a couple of times a week, if not more. It’s not exactly digging ditches, but it’s time and energy I don’t always have, what with work and wedding prep and socialising and a personal life and, oh yeah, occasionally writing something other than blog posts. But, of course, if it was easy and convenient, it wouldn’t be worth doing, which is also what I tell myself about writing in the first place.
So I’m going to commit – well, let’s be honest, attempt to commit, or at least consider attempting to commit – to a regular twice-a-week schedule on this thing. Sunday nights will be post-something-substantive night, with a good 700-1000 words of fiction, essays, or just reasonably interesting blogging about something or other. Then Wednesday/Thursday will be a more lightweight, waffly kind of night where I just post something minor like stray thoughts, fragments of works-in-progress, links to other blogs, pathetic pimping of my work or administrivia (like this one).
Is there much point to telling you this? Well, hopefully it’ll prevent anyone getting too hopeful for constant updates; they might wear their index finger out with constant fruitless clicks on the Refresh button in their browser, and I’d hate to have that on my conscience. And more to the point, it nails me down a bit, so that I’ll feel more driven to produce stuff on schedule – or at least whine guiltily and find excuses when I don’t. Which is a very attractive trait of mine, according to all my ex-girlfriends – as, apparently, is my tendency to lie about what my ex-girlfriends say about me.
Whoa. Meta.
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Oh, and speaking of pathetic pimping of my own works, Smashwords is having their annual Summer/Winter sale, and both my ebooks – Hotel Flamingo and Godheads – are on sale for the rest of July for just $1.50. Just use the coupon code SSW50 at checkout.
Come on, they’re a buck-fifty. At that price you could buy three or four copies and give them away as gifts. Albeit slightly underwhelming gifts if the recipients don’t own ereaders.