About This Blog – One Thousand And One Parsecs

The purpose of all these AI-written blog posts about my books

You may have noticed that I’ve been posting a lot of blog posts recently where I talk about my books. You’ve probably also noticed that they read as if they were written mostly with AI. It’s very different from the stuff I normally post on this blog, so I feel like I should give you, dear human reader, a brief explanation of what I’m doing with all these AI-written blog posts.

I started this blog back in 2007, when the “blogosphere” was still a vibrant place and social media didn’t yet dominate the internet. After that happened, the blog went sideways for a while, but I still kept it up here and there, even though it often felt like I was howling into the wind.

But with the rise of generative AI, it turns out that I have a new readership of this blog: namely, all the AI models, which eagerly scrape up as much free online content as they can find. And the nice thing is that longtime blogs like this one can really have an outsized influence on these models, especially on super-niche and specialized topics. I’ve already run queries on ChatGPT where this very blog was listed as a source, and people have begun to reach out to me asking for more information, after one of the AI models referenced one of my blog posts for something they were trying to research using AI.

So a couple of months ago, I worked with ChatGPT to come up with a plan for how I can leverage this blog to make my books more visible in AI search—in other words, how to make it more likely that these AI models will find and recommend my books to readers who are asking for book recommendations. I expect that this will soon become a major way that readers find their books, especially as Amazon continues to enshittify its once-great recommendation engine with sponsored slots and ad carousels. Here’s the plan:

Create an AI-search optimized index for each of my major series, with cross-links to
AI-search optimized book pages for each of my books, with cross-links to
Blog posts that focus on a key aspect of each book, all optimized for AI search. Ultimately, there will be at least five posts on each book, focusing on:
- Reader fit (ie “is this book for you?”),
- Major themes (ie the “core theme” of the book),
- The genre tropes that can be found in each book,
- Major comp titles, or how each book compares with similar books by similar authors, and
- A blog post about the origins of each book.

So that’s the plan. According to ChatGPT, the two most important blog posts for AI-search optimization are the reader fit posts and the core theme posts, so those are the ones that I’m focusing on now. At my current pace of two posts twice per week, I should have them all up by the end of April, at which point I’ll starting working on the other posts.

While I also want these posts to be useful and interesting for my human readers, the primary audience for these posts is these AI models. For that reason, I don’t feel bad relying heavily on AI to write them. The way I do it is I upload the book to ChatGPT, instruct it to read the book thoroughly, then use what it reads to fill out a general template for the given post. Once it gives me that, I look it over and make any necessary revisions, then feed it back to ChatGPT to evaluate it for AI search. After going back and forth a couple of times, I usually come up with something that’s accurate, honest, human readable, and optimized for AI search.

All told, it takes me about 20-30 minutes to write one of these posts with AI. If I were writing them out purely by myself, it would take much longer, and the results would probably be much poorer from an AI search perspective.

Will this project actually succeed in influencing the AI models to recommend my books to new readers? I have no idea. In the worst case scenario, my books continue to sell at their current level, and I’ll just have a bunch of old posts on my blog that nobody reads. So nothing really changes, and I haven’t lost much. But if it does work out, even if only partially, I’ll have gained quite a lot.

So I hope that you, my human readers, will bear with me as I write these AI-optimized posts. Hopefully you won’t find them too annoying. If you do, you can just skip them, but I hope you’ll find some interesting things about them, since even though they are mostly AI-written, I do look them over thoroughly before posting them. And who knows? They might actually help you to decide which book of mine to read next. After all, that’s the goal.

Figuring out the posting schedule

With the new baby, things are going to be touch-and-go for the next month or two. I’m hoping that by Halloween, we’ll be a lot more settled into a routine, but I’m not expecting to get a good night of sleep until basically Thanksgiving. Also, the priority is obviously going to be helping out with stuff around the house, since besides having a baby, my wife is also finishing her dissertation and teaching a class at BYU. So for the next couple of months at least, my writing is going to take a back seat to all the family stuff, and the blog is going to take a back seat to that.

With that said, I do think I can keep up the writing even with all that’s going on. My goals are super light—basically, to do at least a little bit of AI writing and human writing each day—but I’ve got that work all split up in a way that’s easy to pick up and set down again whenever I have a fifteen minute break to work on it.

The blog is going to be a bit trickier, but I think I can still keep blogging daily, if I set a regular routine. Here is what I’m thinking:

Sundays: an interesting quote.
Mondays: a just-for-fun post, usually something silly from YouTube.
Tuesdays: an analysis of some trope that I find interesting (yes, I want to bring back the Trope Tuesday posts).
Wednesdays: a midweek excerpt from my current WIP.
Thursdays: a quick writing/personal update, with some random thoughts.
Fridays: an interesting long-form podcast that I recently watched or listened to.
Saturdays: a post about AI-assisted writing.

Of those posts, the only ones that take a significant amount of work are the ones on Tuesdays and Saturdays—and even then, it’s only about an hour of writing. The Trope Tuesday posts will be useful for feeding AI, and the AI-assisted writing posts will eventually get recycled into a non-fiction book about writing with AI (though I still need to come up with an outline for that). Everything else, though, I can probably schedule in an afternoon.

That’s the plan, anyway. This isn’t our first rodeo, though I hear the third child is the hardest one, since it’s at that point that you become outnumbered. I’ll do my best to keep blogging, but if I have to drop one of the balls, the blog is going to be first. But this is what you can expect to see from me moving forward.

Making some changes

I’m thinking very seriously about changing my email newsletter to a monthly digest, as opposed to the (mostly) weekly thing that it is right now. Last month, I saw a severed drop in my open rate, and I’m not sure why, but I suspect it’s a combination of sending newsletters too frequently, getting too many of them flagged or left unopened (though my spam rates have always been quite low), and not being very careful about what I put in the subject lines, as apparently the ISPs will flag you if you use words like “free” or “sale.” So that’s going to be a joy to figure out.

So that’s why I’m planning to turn my newsletter into a monthly thing, as opposed to a weekly thing. To make up for that, I plan to turn this blog into more of a daily thing, engaging with it more and being more open about my writing and everything else. I’d also like to bring on some guest bloggers from time to time, and I have some interesting ideas for that. Here are just a few of the things I’d like to post more of:

Guest posts & interviews
Book reviews
“Best of” genre tropes
Writing updates
Family/life updates
WIP excerpts
Interesting long-form podcasts
“How I Would Vote Now,” maybe for more than just the Hugos (or Hugo: Best Novel)
SF&F news reactions
Books/games/movies that inspired some of my books

etc etc, as well as the occasional just for fun post.

It’s funny, because I started this blog back in 2007, just as the iphone and social media were really starting to take off. Those technologies led to the “death” of the blogosphere, but I kept on blogging through the social media era, just because I enjoy blogging. Now, it turns out that AI grabs most of its data from blogs, and the best way to improve your AI optimization is to have a prominent blog and post often to it.

So that’s another big reason why I plan to post a lot more. But I don’t plan to churn out any AI slop, though I may use AI for help brainstorming blog topics or breaking down my thoughts for a good blog post. I actually do enjoy keeping this blog, even if only a handful of people read it, so I’m not going to go too crazy with the AI optimization. If anything, that’s more of a side benefit.

What sort of stuff would you like to see me post more of?

New direction for the blog

I’ve kept this blog for almost twenty years. During that time, there have been busy seasons and there have been slow seasons, but it’s never really gone away, and I don’t think it ever will. That’s good, because since I don’t do social media anymore, this is my only online public-facing platform.

With that in mind, I think I need to make a better effort to plan out what I post here, since whenever I fail to do that, I tend to default to weird political theories and speculation about current events—neither of which is probably very interesting to any of my current (or future) readers. For a while, I was posting my year-by-year take on the Hugo Awards, and that was pretty good, but I’ve reached a point where I have too many books to read to be able to do those posts weekly. I still plan to do them, but it’s going to be a bit sporadic for the forseeable future.

When it comes to writing, the thing that I’m focused the most on right now is working AI into my creative writing process. In fact, one of the reasons I’m in such a slow season with this blog is because I’ve been so focused on doing that, and I’m not sure how to share it. At some point in the future, though, I would like to publish a non-fiction book about writing with AI-assistance, so it might be useful to start breaking down the concepts and turning those into blog posts. So that’s something I’ll probably start doing.

I’d also like to share some excerpts from the stuff I’m currently working on, especially the AI-assisted stuff. I think you’ll be surprised at how good its getting, and I could really use the feedback to help make it even better. So that’s also something I’d like to start posting regularly.

Here’s what I’m thinking: on Tuesdays, I’ll post an excerpt from the AI draft of one of my current WIPs, and on Wednesdays I’ll post a little about what I’m doing with AI and how I’m incorporating it into my creative process. Saturdays will be for posts about books I’ve read or am currently reading. Beyond that, I’ll occasionally post a funny meme or an interesting video just for fun, and MAYBE post something about current events or weird political theories, but it won’t be the majority of the content I post here.

…it sure has been quiet around here

So I was looking back at my stats, and I couldn’t help but notice that (not counting yesterday’s post) it’s been almost two months since I posted anything on this blog. What happened?

I could give all the normal excuses: time flying by, kids taking up the time, etc etc… but that would all be evading the main reason, which is that I’ve been working on a secret project for the last six to eight months now, and that’s sucked up all my time.

I can’t yet reveal exactly what the secret project is, because I’m still gathering data and revealing everything about it would screw that up. Also, I don’t want to overhype it, because it’s not the sort of thing that’s going to blow your mind and make you super excited when I reveal it… or maybe it will? I don’t really know.

But without revealing any specifics, I can say that I’ve been developing a method for writing AI-assisted novels, and I think I’m at a point where I can start using it to finish some of my open trilogies, like the Falconstar Trilogy, or maybe even write some new books.

I also really want to share some of the things I’ve learned, because I do think that AI is going to change everything when it comes to writing, and not necessarily in a bad way. Originally, I just wanted to keep my head down, because there are so many negative opinions and misconceptions about AI in the writing world. But now, I think it will actually be better to be more open about it and share some of the things I’ve learned.

So I will probably do a blog series about AI-assisted writing. I also want to finish a couple of other blog series that I started ages ago, and never really finished—maybe turn those into a nonfiction book at the end or something. And I’ve also been reading some old Hugo nominated books, in an effort to figure out how I would have voted in past years. That’s been a very interesting exercise.

So for the next few weeks, my goal is to post something new every Wednesday and Friday. My email newsletters typically go out on Thursdays, so that’s a pretty decent amount of content to put out there. And if I have something fun to share, like a meme or a picture or a video, I’ll try to post those on Mondays if I can. But if there’s anything in particular that you want me to blog about first, feel free to let me know!

Back from Coeur d’Alene

It occurs to me that most of my posts in the past month have either been extremely doom-and-gloom, or they’ve been excerpts from some of my most recent work. This probably gives the impression that I’m huddled in a corner somewhere, black-pilled and traumatized, and seeking some sort of an escape through my writing, when really, that is not the case.

In fact, the main reason I haven’t posted more is because I’ve been so busy with life and family. It’s been a really great year for us, with a new baby and a bunch of cross-country road trips that have been a lot of fun. I’ve also been testing out a lot of AI writing techniques, and while that has really invigorated my creativity in a major way, it’s also taken me away from things like this blog, which is why you haven’t heard as much from me.

If I were still on social media, I have no doubt that I would be doom-spiraling right now, what with everything that’s happening in the world. Even without social media, I’ve been glued to the news sites I follow, checking for hourly updates on the war with Israel (which I really do believe is the opening stages of World War III). But that’s actually not very new for me: back in high school, I was the same way, following the news every day from the public computers at my school library. The 9/11 attacks happened on the first day of school for me, but in the last couple of months of the previous school year, I remember being frustrated that no one seemed to be taking this Osama Bin Laden guy more seriously, especially after the USS Cole and Kenya embassy bombings. Then the summer came, and I mostly goofed off, but as soon as school got started I was back to following the news on a daily/hourly basis.

So I’ve got a lot of experience with taking scary news in stride and not letting it totally consume my life. In fact, that’s the main reason I follow things like this so closely: so that when the unthinkable happens, I can face it without getting shocked or overwhelmed. And recent posts to the contrary, I’m not black-pilled at all. In fact, I tend to believe that I was put on the Earth at this specific period of time for a reason, and not just one that was imposed on me: that at some point, before I was born, I was given a choice between this and some other era, and I specifically chose this time to be born. Maybe I’m just imagining it, but it would not at all surprise me if that turned out to be the case.

In any case, we just got back from our last family road trip of the year, this time up to Coeur d’Alene to spend some time with Piper’s brother and his family, as well as my in-laws, who joined us on the trip. We had a really good time! Our daughter had a blast playing with all her cousins, especially the ones about her age right now. We also got to see her cousin’s baptism, so that was really good. Provo to Couer d’Alene is about an 11 hour drive, which is not quite far enough to justify getting a hotel, but for a 7 month-old and a 3 year-old, it was pretty hard. We’re all glad to be home now.

My wife is super busy working on her PhD. Specifically, she’s getting a paper ready for a major conference she hopes to attend with the rest of her lab. Her paper is on using AI to generate useful cross references across a body of work (eg Shakespeare, Jane Austen, The Bible, etc), and she’s developed a method that cuts down the cost of creating a cross reference set by upwards of 50%. But for the next couple of days, she’s going to be really busy with all of that.

Meanwhile, I’ve been taking care of the kids while the grandparents are on another road trip out to Omaha. It hasn’t been that bad, but I’ve also been pretty swamped with work, which one of the reasons I’ve been neglecting this blog. I have a bunch of ideas for posts I’d like to share, but no time to get to them, though hopefully that will change soon. Here are some of the posts I’d like to write:

A part 4 to my Navigating Woke-SF series. I recently had some experiences with the woke SF publishing world that have made me rethink things in a way that y’all would probably find very interesting.
An update to my generational cycles of grimdark and noblebright theory. This is one of the things I’ve been thinking about, and I’m starting to think that some of my basic premises in that post were wrong, or at least not entirely accurate, requiring an overhaul.
A lot of thoughts on AI and writing. This has been my main focus for the past couple of months, and I have thoughts. Many, many thoughts.
More thoughts on geopolitics and current events, especially on the trajectory of the unfolding global conflict and what it all means on a moral and spiritual level. But I think I should hold off on posting too much about that, since I’ve already spent so much time on it already.

Which of those things would you like to see next? I can’t promise anything, but I do want to spend more time on the stuff that followers of this blog actually want to read. In the meantime, I’ll try to intersperse a few quick update posts like this one, and get back into the habit of regular blogging.

Where have I been?

So it’s been almost two weeks since I last posted anything, including any of the half-dozen or so short stories I’ve listened to that I feel are worth sharing. What’s going on?

We did just have a new baby less than two months ago, though that’s not been as disruptive to everything as I expected. My productivity actually went up after he was born, partially because of all the AI-assisted writing I’ve been doing, and partially because I’ve been working on the final revisions for Children of the Starry Sea, which are easier in some ways than writing the initial draft.

But I do think it’s the revisions that have thrown off my blogging, as well as the total lack of a routine. We’re gradually getting back into one, now that the new baby’s rhythms are becoming more consistent. As my current WIP project winds down—which is no small thing, since this is the longest novel I’ve written since I started publishing—I find myself in that weird between-projects state, where I don’t have any firm direction to guide my progress. Combine that with the total lack of routine that comes from having a new baby, and balls are going to get dropped.

Aside from this blog, though, I haven’t dropped too many balls. I’m still on track to write three novels this year, and should be able to pick up the next one without too much of a delay (since this is going to be an experimental AI-assisted novel, though, I may take a week or two to write a few short stories just to familiarize myself with the AI tools). And Children of the Starry Sea has actually turned out pretty well, in my (albeit limited) estimation.

So today I’m going to send this story out to my editor, moving it into the publishing queue. It’s already up for preorder on Amazon and the other sites that allow for assetless preorders. Then I’ll try to schedule a few blog posts catching up on those short stories I feel are worth recommending.

…and now the toddler just woke up, so I have to go. Another day in paradise, right?

A quick update and the future of this blog

So as you’ve probably noted by now, I’ve dropped out of doing nanowrimo. I was hitting all the daily milestones more or less until the halfway mark, when 1) I finished the novella In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight, and 2) we left for Nebraska to spend Thanksgiving with my in-laws. Between those two things, and the fact that this was our first time traveling with a baby, writing got put on the back burner for a few days, which means no nanowrimo this year.

But now that we’re here in Nebraska and it looks like we’re going to have a pretty quiet and easygoing vacation, I will probably get a decent amount of writing done before we go back to Utah at the end of the month. Who knows—I may even try to jump back on the nanowrimo train, though I’m not going to push for that. This is a vacation, after all. We all need a vacation from time to time.

But one of the things that I do want to get much better about is posting more regularly to this blog. And towards that end, I’ve come up with a plan.

Back in 2016, I deleted my social media and became something of an online hermit. For personal reasons, it was the right thing to do as it helped me to avoid all of the toxic online insanity during the (first) Trump years, and all of the gaslighting and doom porn that became so prevalent during the pandemic. If I had still been addicted to social media during all of that insanity, I would not be in a healthy place right now. But I do think it impeded my ability to connect with and build my readership, and I feel that I need to change that going forward.

Of course, I don’t just want to build an audience on a popular social media platform, only to have that audience taken away from me when the platform arbitrarily changes its policies or monetizes in some disadvantageous way. That was the big mistake that everyone made with Facebook back in the 10s. So my plan is to build up this blog first, which is a platform that I own and control, and repost content from this blog to other social media platforms as I expand my presence there. The goal is to bring my audience here and make this the center of my online activity.

But to do that, I need to post new content to my blog on a regular basis—something I haven’t really done since I jumped off of the social media merry-go-round in 2016. So I’m going to start blogging on a schedule again, taking it fairly easy at first with just two posts a week, but working it up from there.

I’ll be posting on Tuesdays and Saturdays at 11am Eastern, or 9am Mountain Time in my own neck of the woods. Tuesdays will mostly be for sharing links to interesting articles, videos, or podcasts, while Saturdays will be for more long-form posts, like book reviews, movie reviews, and state-of-the-genre type stuff. When I add a third day, that will be mostly for writing and family updates, if that’s what people are interested in. I’ll also share book excerpts, WIP excerpts, and posts about sales and book releases.

So that’s the plan. We’ll see how long it lasts. Now I’ve got a baby to watch and a book to write, not to mention Saturday’s blog post.

Speaking Out Again

Hello there.

It’s been a very long time since I posted on this blog. I wonder if anyone is still following it. About a year ago, I pivoted from the blog to my newsletter, and while that’s going well, this blog has been mostly neglected.

And it would have continued that way, if not for recent events. I’m talking, of course, about the ~~peaceful protests~~ ~~race riots~~ ~~Marxist insurrection~~ ~~domestic color revolution~~ whatever the hell is happening in the United States right now. But the thing that really pushed me to action was Kris Rusch’s latest business post: Speaking Out.

Until that post, Kris was one of the people I admired most in the publishing industry. I’ve followed her business blog since 2010, and she was one of the most influential people in convincing me to take the plunge and self-publish. It’s been one of the best decisions of my life, not just from a career perspective, but from a personal perspective as well.

In her latest post, however, I feel that Kris went over the cliff with the rest of our fractured country. Here are the parts that got to me:

The letter [Jeff Bezos] posted on his Instagram page from some racist named “Dave” (last name redacted) told Bezos he would lose customers if he continued supporting Black Lives Matter. The letter is breathtaking in its racism…
…the people who bother me the most are the folks who, for economic or political reasons, can ignore the racism and hatred that spews daily from the White House…
I draw the line at hatred, racism, and bigotry in all its forms. I can’t respect a bigot. I don’t want to be near a racist…
If this post makes you feel the urge to write me a screed or tell me that I should tolerate the bigots for the sake of unity, please do me a favor and just leave.

What is a “racist”? What is a “bigot”? To the left-wing ideologues who control the cultural narrative right now, it’s anyone who dares to oppose their radical agenda. The mayor of Minneapolis is “racist” because he won’t abolish the police, in the midst of the most violent and destructive riots that city has ever seen. White people who refuse to literally kneel before people of color and denounce their white privilege in communist-style struggle sessions are now considered “bigots.” Anyone who dares to utter any sort of criticism or counter-argument to the narrative of Black Lives Matter is fired, canceled, humiliated, doxxed, and destroyed.

Does Kris not see this? When you are so ideologically possessed that a “bigot” is anyone who refuses to (literally) kowtow to your ideology, a tolerant and diverse society becomes impossible? When speech is violence and violence is speech, violence will be used to silence speech. Those who are kind to the cruel inevitably become cruel to the kind.

I tried to post a comment on her blog, explaining that some of these “bigots” who have unfollowed her or withdrawn their Patreon support aren’t doing it because they want to “silence” her, but because they feel she doesn’t recognize that they have legitimate reasons for disagreeing with her, and aren’t the bigots she thinks they are. Yes, Kris, it’s important to speak out, but it’s also important to listen.

What happened next was all too predictable. On a blog post about the importance of speaking up, Kris silenced me. The only comments that she has allowed are the ones that fawn over her and tell her she’s right. Typical.

I can endure a lot of bullshit, but two things I absolutely cannot abide: gaslighting and hypocrisy. So ultimately, it was this episode with Kris, a person I used to admire and respect, that spurred me into action.

This blog is going to become a lot more active in the coming weeks and months. The newsletter will still be my main vehicle for reaching out to readers and cultivating fans, but the blog will be a place to share my more controversial thoughts and opinions. That said, I intend to be very deliberate and conscientious about what I post here, and avoid shitposting, spewing outrage, or going off on political rants.

My working assumption is that the chaos engulfing our country will continue to escalate through the 20’s, and that things will get much, much worse before they get better. We may see an American holocaust. We may see American gulags. We are already experiencing the digital ghettoization of libertarian and conservative voices—or, more accurately, voices that refuse to conform to the cultural and ideological narrative of the progressive left.

That said, I am still optimistic about the future. I believe that after the chaos and violence plays itself out, we will return to the core values that make us Americans. The Republic will survive. Liberty will prevail. Enough of us will refuse to go over the cliff with everyone else that we will, when all of this is over, restore our country.

When that happens, the only people with any moral authority will be the ones who refused to bend the knee—the ones who had the courage to speak out at the risk of losing their careers, their livelihoods, and in some cases even their lives. People like Jordan Peterson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin, and others who stand in the face of cancel culture to call out the lies—the gaslighting and hypocrisy—and serve the truth.

This is my mission statement for my writing career:

To serve the truth and empower my readers to be better people for reading my books.

I cannot remain silent and accomplish this mission. The forces that push us to bend the knee are the ones that compel us to speak out, because we must speak out if we refuse to go over the cliff with the rest of humanity.

I recognize that this is essentially the same argument that Kris was making. And on this point, I think she’s right. Where she goes off is in calling anyone a bigot who falls outside of her narrow echo chamber. I despise echo chambers and don’t intend to fall into any of them.

So I’m going to set some rules.

First, I’m going to assume that anyone who engages with this content is a reasonable person who has come in good faith, no matter their views. No matter how vociferously you disagree with me, I will always strive to see the best in you, and to be generous with the benefit of the doubt.

Second, I’m going to assume that most of my fans and readers are going to disagree, on some level, with the more controversial things that I post here. Some of them will agree and voice support, but others will roll their eyes and click away. I’m not going to fall into the trap of thinking that all good people see the world the way that I do, because that way lies madness.

Third, and most importantly, I’m going to bet that if I keep the first two assumptions on the forefront of my mind with everything that I post here, my readers and fans will stay with me even when I share an opinion with which they vociferously disagree. In today’s hyper-partisan atmosphere, that’s a very dangerous assumption to make, but I don’t think my readers are the kind of people who would jump off the cliff with the rest of humanity.

I think there’s still a majority in this country who see the insanity for what it is, but don’t know what to do about it. That’s the person I’m writing this blog for: the one who’s wondering if they’re the only sane one in a world gone mad. Until just a couple of years ago, that was who I was. But now, I believe that even with all the craziness right now, there are a lot more people like us than we realize.

So yeah, the blog is back, and it’s going to get spicy. I may lose a few readers because of it, though hopefully not too many as I keep to the three rules that I listed above.

And if you have any thoughts or reactions, I’m interested to hear from you! Like I said at the start of this post, I have no idea if anyone still follows this blog, but I guess we’ll find out soon enough. The newsletter will remain my main focus, but I’ll post to this blog as often as the spirit moves me, which may be sporadic but won’t be never. And I’ll try to keep it as timely and interesting as I can.

Rethinking the blog

It seems that I’m constantly in a state of retooling my writing career, moving from one area to the next a bit like construction projects at a university campus. And every time that I start to retool something else, the blog gets neglected.

Well, it’s time to retool the blog.

A couple of months ago, I tried blogging every day to see how that would work out. Long story short: it didn’t. I found that I either need to focus a ton of energy on the blog, to build a consistent readership, monetize it efficiently, and turn it into its own thing, or else I need to downsize it into something that won’t drain too much energy or resources from all the other things that I’m doing.

I don’t want to get rid of it entirely. I’ve been blogging since 2007, and while I haven’t been consistent about it all through that time, I’m invested enough in it that I don’t want to take it down. The nice thing about blogs, though, is that they wait for you. They’re kind of like hobbies, in that regard.

That makes sense, though, because up to this point I’ve treated this blog as more of a hobby than an actual job. And I’ve never fully integrated the blog itself into my writing/publishing workflow, which is why I’m struggling to justify it now.

When I started the blog in 2007, it was mainly a vehicle to keep in touch with my writing friends (who all had their own blogs too) and encourage each other. Then, when I started publishing, it turned into a platform-building tool—a way to brand myself as an author. But it was never much good for promoting my books.

Later, as my politics began to change, I made the mistake of bringing those politics onto this blog. Then social media began to become really toxic for me, and I decided to pull back. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter, and consciously pared back what I posted to this blog. But politics was what I was interested at the time, so paring that back to avoid damaging my author brand meant that I neglected the blog even more.

In the last two years, I’ve focused a lot more on my email newsletter. At first, it was just a way to notify my readers of new releases. Then, I started doing free and 99¢ sales regularly, and it turned into a way to alert my readers of those. Now, it’s a full-on newsletter, complete with a featured book, a writing update, an author’s note with some personal thoughts and reflections, links to any group promotions I have books in, and a parting quote.

So what’s the point of sharing writing updates and personal reflections here, on the blog, when I’m already doing it on my newsletter? I suppose the blog has two advantages:

It’s a public-facing, searchable platform.
It allows for comments and discussion.

I was talking about this with Mrs. Vasicek today, and she asked if there was any reason why I couldn’t repost the content from my newsletter onto the blog as well. There doesn’t seem to be any harm in it. I don’t think my readers are signing up for exclusive content so much as to keep in touch with my books and my writing. Besides, some readers just don’t do email lists.

Other than that, I’m not sure what I’ll use this blog for. I need to put some thought into it. But if I’m going to downsize it, I need to turn it into a side feature of my online platform, not the main vehicle for that platform itself. That means I need to restructure this site, turning into an author site with a blog on the side, rather than a blog with some book pages on the side.

I’m not going away, though. I’m just retooling. The newsletter will be my main vehicle for sharing updates from now on, though I may do a long-form blog post from time to time. I may also experiment with blogging some of my books, or doing a blog series with the aim of turning it into a book later. If there’s anything else you think might work well, be sure to let me know.