Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

This week marks the achievement of a blogging milestone for me. This is the 52^nd week in a row I have posted a blog on Tuesday. Hooray!

Now, blogging isn’t the powerhouse it once was in terms of garnering engagement, especially in my simple words on a page and nothing more format, but after three fallow years of sporadic entries there is once again a faint pulse of life to be found here, and that is heartening. 2018 was my high water mark in blogging, and that was way past blogging’s peak (when exactly that was I’m not sure: 2008-2012 maybe?? I’m a hilarious late adopter and first blogged in 2013, so the peak had to be over by the time I first dipped my toe in the waters!), and I was trying to put out two blogs a week that year, which proved to be a tough row to hoe, and I burned out. Last year I evolved quite accidentally from a burst of rants into doing something more chattily achievable, and Lo! I achieved it. (Is this the lowering of a personal bar, or realism? You decide.)     

So in terms of my online presence and impact, 2023 didn’t set the heather on fire (I now have questions about that particular saying) but I am still very happy with the achievement, my faithful few friends, because this blog has allowed me to hold myself accountable, to set goals and mostly meet them, to share this process and work to achieve another dream, another book release. It isn’t here yet, but the book stork is in flight, delivery inbound. I suspect that had I continued to hide from the world, to not regularly post my progress through each phase along the long road to publication, I would not have travelled nearly so far. The discipline of blogging each week has made me a tiny bit more professional, and that is a great thing, for which I am very thankful.

And speaking of discipline and progress, depending on the criteria used I am now either 55.5% or 60% of the way through the copy edit. Over half-way there, and gaining momentum. Sweet.

This blog, these 52 weeks of consistent production I hope presages better things to come. I might get crazy and start paying consistent attention to my Amazon ads and start to work on my campaigns there to increase their effectiveness. That would be a simple next step. Before that I could maybe pay regular attention to my business email, and clean out the spam, again! Read one marketing article a week, I have hundreds stored. There is so much to learn, and I admit I am more focused on learning about writing than sales and marketing, (because my main goal is to be a better writer, not a better marketer) even as I must acknowledge that eventually sales and marketing must be addressed if I want to find more than the beautiful random readers who stumble across my books and take a chance on them. Those readers are gold, and I treasure them. Thank you, my random readers!

So next week will be the one year anniversary of my first Tuesday blog, which hit on 2/28/23. I think I will try to add another task to my Tuesdays, and work on it consistently, alongside the blog. Pushing on the end of a string, perhaps; but if I’m learning, I’m growing, and in life that is one of the great pleasures we can grant ourselves. I may be somewhat gloomy about prompt farms and the lowest common denominatorism of writing in the future, but I’m excited by the idea of improving, and still have faith that creative people will always have a place in the evolving artistic marketplace. And it has always been a marketplace, because artists have always needed to eat. Once it was no patron, no burger, now it is no customers no burger. I do write for my own pleasure, but like a four year old with a toy and a new friend, it feels better to share.  

Keep sharing, my friends.

Obviously I will now take next week off.