Wondering

I have, in the past month, achieved two notable goals here at triond, in that I reached 1,000 posts published and went past 100,000 views, but the actual moments of success were extremely anti-climatic, and left me questioning just why I had pushed so hard, and devoted so much time and effort to what were, after all, ambitions that were pretty meaningless to anyone but myself.

Thing is that I sort of came out of some kind of writing daze, waking up to a reality that smacks us all in the face at times, that of my being, despite the literally hundreds of positive comments I get every month about my work, pretty much an unknown in the literary world, something I need to address, yet I have no real desire to write a a book. It should not be that hard to do so, and I have in the past won awards for fiction, but I just don’t know how I feel right now,

For the second time in my writing life I am at something of an impasse, wanting to move forward and feeling the itch to be creative and write, yet at the same time feeling a sense of having done enough already, proved my point to the world, in that I am a good writer whose work people like to read, so do I really need to keep pushing so hard at my writing, or could I not rein back a little, rest on my laurels?

Hell no, I hear the cries from fellow scribes, the writing bug is hungry, and failure to come up with new work is failure to feed that voracious appetite, which could result in your losing that writing edge, if the writing bug that drives you starts to wither. Problem is that just now I have once again started to read, something that has been lacking in my life since I became so single-minded about hitting targets, and I realize what I have been missing,

Writers like Karin Slaughter, Kathy Reichs, Tess Gerritsen, Glenn Meade, Patricia Cornwell to name but a few can all transport you to a different world as you immerse yourself in their novels, and something inside of me yearns to emulate that ability. Reading helps me focus on the things I love about writing, and I have nowhere near enough of it lately. That is why I have slowed down my posts so much, because I have been reading to re-ignite the writing spark, that was starting to fade.

I have stopped using triendster, BTW, as I wanted to experiment with he effectiveness of having used it continually over six weeks, in terms of longer-term viewership. It was a major disappointment, I fear, because the moment I stopped running it, views fell away again, and have not recovered at all, and since the idea was supposedly that the software would create long-term loyal viewers, it seems to me that it fails on that count, though it has a certain effectiveness when running.

The new flag button implemented by the triond admin does actually seem to be having some effect, though it seems that the disappearance of long-term stalwart writers like Jimmy Shilaho and Sheila Barnhill is still going on, because the rewards for remaining loyal to triond are pretty abysmal, in reality. I cannot bring myself to just abandon a site to which I have given so much, though my input will be noticeably less from now on. I simply need to re-evaluate my writing priorities.

Trawling the net each day searching out article ideas is iring and time-consuming, but a necessary evil if one wishes to satisfy the voracious appetites of the average viewer for brief pieces of interest, things they can have read and moved on from in a couple of minutes, but are such posts really the type of written work for which we want to be known, because the certainty is that they are very quickly forgotten, not something I want to be my fate as a writer.

I want people to read my stuff then come looking for more because they like the way I put things, the style of writing, the humour and the creative talent, and these are the things I want to be remembered for. My writing needs to have meaning for the reader, if I am to claim that it is good and thought-provoking. I am not sure, as bog as triond is, that the site is the best platform for getting to where, as a writer I eventually want to go, but it provides a solid base from which to work.

hings are slowly, achingly so, improving on the site in terms of quality, and it appears that the feared witch-hunt of the August Challenge has not actually materialized, possibly because the offer of 10% extra of not much anyway has not made that big an impact as an incentive.  All the same, the signs are there that things are starting to get better, and if the momentum builds, perhaps the site can climb back up the rankings to where it deserves to be.

I am only one of many writers here who produce good quality work, and if we all continue to work at it, then the improvements will start to become much clearer to see, so I am all in favor of doing my best to help that along, even if my input does get somewhat reduced by other writing projects. The triond family feeling is the one truly priceless asset that can save this site, the reason that I stick around, so I will keep on travelling the triond road, just at a much more leisurely pace.