July’s been slow, mostly due to heatwaves, distractions with local politics, and disrupted sleep. (Heatwaves always seem to get my insomnia roaring, but it’s getting back under control, provisionally.)
What little progress there has been has convinced me of two things.
Firstly, I think I need to post more stuff.
I think my relationship to writing has gotten… stranger, over the years, and I’m not sure how to quantify it. There’s a hazy element around ‘writing for myself’ versus ‘writing for others to see’, and the way that as I started pursuing more ‘professional’ outlets – paying venues, self-publishing, etcetera – I kind of… changed the nature of those things?
At one stage in my life, writing for myself was about playing around in my head, and writing for others to see was finding ways to share that. Right now, writing for myself is about finding a passion project and writing for others to see is about connecting to an audience, and… There’s pros and cons about all that, but I think I need to, at least, experiment with going back a bit.
Unfortunately, the internet of five years ago, ten years ago, a depressing number of years ago, does not really exist anymore.
So.
Secondly, I think I need to rethink how I present my stuff.
Primarily this is going to be how I stick my own fiction online, assuming I start posting more of it up somewhere. Right now I’m looking at using a static site generator of some kind (think something along the lines of a content management system you run on your home PC and that publishes a static site for you) and maybe posting fiction to a subdomain of my website, maybe I’ll replace the whole website with a static webpage.
This won’t stop me from posting whatever fiction I start posting wherever else I can, but it does mean that the definitive ‘place’ for it is somewhere I control.
I don’t know how this’ll go, I’m not sure what the experiments will look like, but I am definitely feeling the need to try and find new, more engaging ways to do things.
And whenever I am finally happy with the state of the two stories I’m working on, I think I am going to quit trying to find a paying venue for them and just post them publically – maybe use Patreon as the main ‘you can support me over here’ thing, but not as the primary distribution channel.
Anyway.
Yes. Things slowed down, but things still happening over here, and I am feeling the need to tweak how I do things.
So, as ever, thank you so much for your support, your interest, and for the opportunity to make things that you enjoy.
Hopefully August’s post will be titled ‘accelerating’…
