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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Monday, June 10, 2013

Quick Poll #2 More Fiction?

What makes you think I'm busy?
Today's poll is in the usual place down towards the bottom of the left hand side of the screen.  It's the black widget right above the About The Author blurb.  

Maintaining the posting schedule here at Writing About Writing is a full time job.

No, I'm not kidding.  If you add everything I do for both the blog and things like promoting the blog and Facebook page, you wind up with something that's just shy of forty hours a week.  Some weeks it can get down around thirty, but most of the time it's closer to 40.  With all my jobs I work close to 80 hours during the school year.  And that's if my roommates don't go all Silkwood on me about the kitchen.

I like writing.  I'm going to keep doing this, but events have been set into motion (more on this soon) that are going to mean I can't keep simply adding more and more time to what I give to writing.  If Writing About Writing brought in enough money that I didn't need my two other jobs, this might not be a question, but when I suggested this possibility to my accountant, there was laughter so riotous that it led to a bursted aneurysm and a very uncomfortable conversation with a bereaved widower.

For a long time, I have lamented not being able to write quite as much fiction as I've wanted to while I work on Writing About Writing.  I absolutely love writing here, but if I had to give it one downside it is that it pulls me away from fiction.  Though I always just assumed I would kind of get the hang of blogging and then be able to do both with aplomb, it hasn't quite worked out that way.  The massive content outpouring here (at least massive for a single author) has meant I'm working on my fiction at a snail's pace.

If I really try to do both, I am assaulted by swamp ninjas from The Order of the Cataclysmic Schedule who draw glittering katanas from sheaths of blackened human flesh and say, "You spoony bard.  Welcome to die!"  Then they set about making sure that all my base are belong to them.

So here's the thing.  Fiction takes a lot longer to write than blogging--the revision process is totally different with fiction and much more involved.  If I started dedicating the kind of bandwidth to fiction that might lead to a predictable story twice a month (or more likely a chapter from a longer work), I might have to drop down to really only one or two articles a week.  I might have to shift the mailbox to every other week or a short question/long question alternating schedule.

While I would likely attempt to put up some content to keep my page views from tanking, only the one (maybe two) wouldn't be a little fluffy.  Sadly, quantity--not quality--is king in web content, and unless I were already quite successful as a writer, there is no way I'm going to turn one or two posts a week into something that could pay the bills.

If you don't know what I mean by my fiction, you can go here and check out what I've posted to W.A.W. so far.

So the question for today's poll is would you like to see more fiction if it meant less frequent articles?

9 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Would you mind me asking why? I'm very curious.

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    2. Itwas a hard choice because I've grown used to the comfort of reading your blog almost daily, but I also love your fiction. So choosing between the two was almost as bad as choosing between mom and dad in a divorce. In the end fiction won out. Sorry blog.

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    3. Damn, Mary. Thank you!!!! I'm a little breathless after that compliment.

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  2. For realsies?! I can't answer both my actual answer and Glen Beck's mayflies?!?!?

    Why you do this to me, Chris? Why, mister, why?

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    Replies
    1. I really wanted people to think about this one.

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    2. You made me use several of my neurons.

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    3. Honestly, I'm just so goddamned proud of you for getting past bacon, I can barely articulate it.

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    4. Well, I'm on this spumoni kick, you see ...

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