Should I Stay or Should I go?
It is the defining moment. I am wondering where to take this weblog. Should I become dedicated to cameras or continue with the random thoughts format.
The certainty is the posts should return weekly or site should be allowed to become dormant. Another alternative would be to focus on a weekly podcast. I will make a firm decision over the weekend.
Why has my site become so neglected? The answer is simple: my work is writing. I am a freelance writer and editor of what is growing into a monster website. My fingers have tapped thousands of keys during the last nine hours. As I write this essay, my email has pinged three notifications. My audio files are stacked with interviews awaiting editing. Over twenty interviews the short ones take about an hour. The long speeches about two and a half hours.
There are tens of articles to edit and stack ready for publication. Plus Hundreds of photographs which need sorting and editing. Is it any wonder this weblog is neglected?
People talk about being a writer. I am a writer, and it provides me with a good income. Writing is a hard taskmaster: And if you write many words, you will make mistakes. And many of them. Sometimes I’m sent submission I read the draft which is supposed to be a ‘finished’ article. Son of God! The piece is beyond useless or redemption. Send it back or reject it and most often the writer takes it persoanally.
If you are a writer and the desire is for ‘sharp’ writing which cuts into the imagination of the reader: You’ll understand honing the blade of influence is a skill which takes tens of years to perfect. The writing must flow. Readers must understand the information or story. It is a difficult enough task to achieve when the luxury of edit and re-editing is available. A professional scribe has no such luxury. We have to write the article, run it through Grammarly or trust to the spell and grammar checker in the software. Then move on to the next commission. Today I have written over ten thousand words in seven articles.
On top of this, I edited a sixty-thousand-word book during the last two weeks. And I am working on my book Philosophy of Selfness. It is a book which is already on Kindle! Even so, I keep reworking the chapters and replacing the file every month. Kindle is a great platform but do not think you’ll make much money by self-publishing. Unless you’re very lucky and the download goes viral. It does happen, but the chances are low. Your work can be a masterpiece, but truth to tell, there are many masterpieces on Kindle, Barnes & Noble and all the rest. The difficulty is there are thousands of masterpieces in the cyber publishing universe. Getting noticed and promotion is ninety percent of success. Write because you love mind expansion, deep thinking and meditation.
Some of the weblogs I follow are majestic examples of the writer’s art. And some which are not well written are brilliant exposes of the author’s creative minds. I’m not worried either way: to my mind the story, information or sentiment makes the essay. From my perspective, posts from my WordPress friends are equal to any Hemingway, Dickens or Rowling. There is writing magic on WordPress. One could argue a strong case that a fifty week a year weblog is a better writing education than an associated degree.
My time is up: Twenty minutes of free flow tapping. The question or purpose of the post is should I refocus my WordPress site or close it down? I have answered the question by typing the article.
I’ll stay with it for a few more years. That’s writing for you! It’ll answer most questions.
See You Soon
Twenty Minutes or one Thousand Words – Time won the race over word count today.
My biggest problem with writing is doing exactly that, the thoughts I have going round in my head are colourful and productive, fiery and intense but it comes to putting them onto paper or the screen it is like somebody knocking over a tin of tartan paint where it spills over everything and the colours merge into one another and make an unholy mess, probably best stick to talking 😉 Good luck on your quest Ian.
Just write it! Ten words at a time! Thanks for your support Rick – See YOu Soon