To blog or not to blog
This month marks the end of my third year of weekly blogging — that’s about 150,000 words or two book length manuscripts worth. Hard to believe, given I am an accidental blogger. How’d it happen?
Let’s go back to August 2020. Like most of you, I had some time on my hands. Unlike many, though, my time was solitary. Caught up in my own head, and my own very recent memories of caregiving for my husband, Jack, and his subsequent medically assisted death, I decided to jot down a quick table of contents for a book I might one day write. Three months later, I raised my head again to realize my table of contents had turned into the beginning of a manuscript, totalling about 60,000 words. The thing is, I knew next to nothing about writing, not having studied English since high school, and never having taken a creative writing course. I certainly knew nothing about writing memoir. I discovered Alison Wearing’s course, Memoir Writing Ink, and ploughed through it in early 2021.
Somewhere along the line I thought my work might one day find its way to a publisher. I knew - and still know - that one key consideration is “reach,” a horrible concept that is personified in the Kardashians. It’s the notion that the number of people who know who you are, regardless of anything you’ve done, or what you think, is a marker of your worth. Publishers select writers that will sell books, not just because of the quality of the book but because people know who they are.
Hence, every writer has a social media presence and a website. With reluctance, I expanded my social media, and with trepidation, I started working on a website with a considerable amount of help from my niece’s wife. (She has continued to support me by uploading all my words and images every week. I am forever in her debt for giving me a professional-quality look.)
“What will you have on your website?” she asked in our first chat about it. Valid question.
“Um, I’ve got a few rabble.ca articles we can post. Oh, and some nice photos of Jack and me and others from my 1st COVID summer. Is that enough?”
“Nope. You need regular content.”
“Well, I guess I could blog?” This from someone who had never followed anyone else’s blogs. Certainly never thought of having my own.
That was the genesis.
The result? Weekly blogs, some as short as 600 words and others exceeding 1500. Topics ranging from death, caregiving, farming, cooking, the royal family, trees, birds, laneway suites, and the housing crisis. Countless images selected from my digital collection, professional shots from three shoots with Jack and another three since he died. Many evenings sitting amid high school yearbooks and photo albums searching for the right pic of the right version of me to complement an historical post. Thousands of kms walking around the neighbourhood writing in my head, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to type a note into my phone. Waking up with a brilliant blog idea only to forget it in the morning. Taking multiple virtual courses to generate content. Publishing at 9 a.m. every Sunday, alerting my growing list of subscribers by email, and posting links on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and multiple groups in Facebook, and slapping an image from the post onto Instagram. Replying to Comments on my website, responding to emails from subscribers, and counting Likes on social media.
Then obsessively poring over the analytics. Over and over and over again. How many have read what pieces? How long are they staying on the page? Where are the readers coming from? Are they tempted to poke around my website? Why? Why not?
For a developing writer, blogging is perfect. Or at least it is for me. It requires regular writing. It gives instant feedback. It shows diversity in content. It demonstrates stick-to-itiveness. It has downsides - some literary journals and contests won’t accept a piece if it’s already been published on my blog. And then of course because of the blog, I’ve not had time to work much on the book-length piece. At least that’s been my excuse.
But in the last few weeks, I’ve been pulling together a compilation of my blogs. I am not sure how or when I will release that compilation as a book, but I’m really jazzed at the idea of trying. So stay tuned!
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