You know those times when you can’t find something to say you have two options: to either not say anything or to make it up and lie like a trooper. I’m taking a third option and talking about my time as a blogger.
Tomorrow will be my fifth anniversary, I will have been writing on this blog for five whole years and let me not starting thinking of the difference between whole years and part years. I started writing as a support to my business of selling pre-loved books online, it was supposed to help me with keywords and bring possible customers here but somewhere along the line I made the transition between writing for the search engines and writing for the sake of writing (I really need to get writing into the sentence a few more times and make it wholly unintelligible). I can’t even tell you when that transition happened but it did and I’m feeling much happier for it. About 15 months ago I even ditched the selling almost completely and got rid of my books although I still have the part-work magazines and I’m working on selling them.
I eventually imposed some restrictions which I break quite often such as wanting to publish at 10:15am Monday to Friday with nothing on the weekends and wanting a minimum of 150 words. There has definitely been some struggle recently with the time restrictions and I rarely get to 150 words with Friday Photos as I don’t want to overload each photo with words. Occasionally my health has gotten the better of me and a migraine has kept me in bed and unable to scribble any kind of words far too long past my arbitrary deadline so I’ve said nothing on those days.
I’ve rarely had a problem finding something to write about but today was the exception until I put fingers to keyboard.
My writing has evolved and I’ve tried different writing styles most especially with Mondayitis where I’ve written in whatever style seems to fit the character or book and sometimes getting 150 words is a real challenge as the character doesn’t want many words.
I’m also branching out as I’m currently proofreading a book for a friend, some of the problems I’m finding are restrictions placed by the software and I’m trying to find as many of those as possible but it’s a challenge as Word is putting in open quotes when they should be closed quotes, I have no idea what sort of fix will be needed for that one. I’m also helping with proofreading and rewriting for a little Mom and Daughter business in the States, their writing scares me as I can’t imagine how they can write so much and so fast. Will I ever get to that standard? I’ll be putting links in my Apropos page when I have them, which reminds me I’ve done a guest post or two which aren’t there I must track them down and fix that.
Looking at all this change I wonder what the next five years will hold in my writing scene. Anyone want to lie like a trooper and make up my next five years for me? It might not be right but it’ll be fun.