Chronicles of a Procrastinating Novelist Volume 1: In Which I Uncover the Subject for My Blog
In bygone days, fiction writers could write their books, enter the publishing rat race, land a deal, and then leave the business end of promoting their work up to people interested in the business of book selling. Alas, then some enterprising figures invented the internet and reduced the old marketing models to so much quintessence of dust. And lo, the fiction writers wept.
That’s an overly elaborate way of saying I’d rather write fiction than blog.
Do pardon the candor. It’s in the interest of honesty, not sympathy begging, I promise.
For nigh a decade, I’ve participated in an extended experiment in foot dragging vis-à-vis blogging as a necessary promotional tool. Despite the plethora of articles suggesting blogging is now an essential feature of modern authorhood (a Google search yields 262,000,000 hits for the words “author blog”), I spent the nascent years of my writing career digging in my heels like a luddite and glaring at the kudzu-esque expansion of author blogs on the internet. On days when my mental fiction pipes rusted over, or I had too few students to tutor, or felt neurotic, or bored, or competitive, or Pinterest hit a dry spell, I scanned the websites of colleagues and Twitter fellows and dreaded the day I’d have to relinquish a portion of my writing time to a blog.
Thus ran the internal monologue of those early days:
“I can’t blog. I’ll have no time to write my actual fiction if I blog.” Please. How many people do you know who’ve not only gotten the same writing degree that you, oh childless-single-madam, have, and they have published a book by now? Heck. Go more fundamental. Look at the word counts of those fat Dickens volumes on your shelf. He drafted them with a quill. You type 80 wpm. When you’re actively composing, you write 4,000 words per day. You can write a 1,000 word blog post once a week.
“I could always just use my actual fiction as the blog posts. Wait! That’s basically self-publishing, isn’t it? What if I get a book deal? No! I won’t blog.” Okay, genius. Don’t post your fiction. And who are you to be so elitist about self-publishing anyway? You know plenty of successful and skilled indie authors. High horse. Dismount. Now.
“I don’t have a subject to blog about that everyone and their cat hasn’t already usurped.” This one is still rather true and is the second biggest obstacle in my creation of an author blog (the first being bullheadedness). What. The heck. Do I write about?
Write about writing? Better writers than me daily spill untold word counts on the subject. Write a personal blog? I’m not precisely a fan of talking publicly about myself. That’s what my utterly-private-guarded-with-the-same-zeal-I-had-as-a-teenager-back-off-or-I-will-cause-you-serious-bodily-harm diary is for. Diaries also have the advantage of lacking internet trolls who attack one for...existing. Write about reading? I love to read. But lots of people do that too. So, yeah, no. Write about something on which I have a unique perspective? Hmmm. By today’s standards, I’m a poster girl for the brand of privilege that earns a measure of weary side eye: white, educated, middle class, cisgender, heterosexual, healthy, able, flimsy Christian, United States citizen. It’s not a perspective that’s in high or necessary demand.
The excuses mounted, but so did the evidence that blogs are now an integral part of the publishing landscape in the modern realm of marketing. My dilemma crystalized into a painfully common theme: I need to blog, but don’t know what to write about.
My solution didn’t come from me. It came from my best friend.
This gem of inspiration was mined from the singular humor I share with my twin sister, who during this same near decade of procrastination exchanged with me a series of humorous emails that she composed at night when night-shift-nurse-induced insomnia would leave her awake and alone. Titled “Chronicles of an Insomniac Duck” (After her ability to mimic Disney’s famous, feathered tantrum pitcher), the sole purpose of these single paragraph ramblings was to amuse me while she whittled away the night hours. If one can call soundless, tearful, side-splitting laughter amused, she succeeded. Where this plays into my current dilemma is this: Duck and I were discussing the impending blog, whereupon she quips, “You could call it Chronicles of a Procrastinating Novelist. That’s when you’d be writing the posts anyway. Between projects.”
My sister is a genius.
More importantly, she’s capable of cutting through the inevitable mountain of intellectual neuroses I heap up around myself when I think about anything but the actual composition of my fiction. I write because I love it. To me, it is as necessary as breathing. If I spent the rest of my life doing nothing but making up stories, regardless of whether or not anyone read them, I’d be content. But I’m also human. I want to share my stories. And, at the risk of sounding kitschy, I feel like I’m led to share those stories. Thanks to a divine confluence of circumstances and my generous publishers, I’ve been given the opportunity to do so. Naturally, the results of that opportunity to fulfill this desire include the neurotic mental gymnastics of an approval seeking introvert. However, these mental gymnastics also represent the actual, point of an author blog in the era of Social Media: the need to connect with readers.
So my blog will be unique in only one aspect. It will be mine. Its contents, will be yours, future readers. My dialogue with you about the various subjects that occupy me when I’m not writing stories. Sometimes they’ll be about the writing process. Sometimes about what I’ve learned from the fiction I might be reading. Sometimes updates on the growing pains of a new story. They could be useless lists of ways I waste time when I should be writing. Perhaps a commentary on the cuteness of duck waddling. I’m open to suggestions. Who knows? If blogging as an author is a tool to connect with readers, then that shall be my aim: to connect. To amuse. I shall write fiction for you. And then when I’m procrastinating, I’ll write you a blog post.
Thank you for reading.
B.
