Selfish

It's been a blue minute since my last post, and while I truly am sorry for the boring inadequacy of my blog, the time off was something long overdue and desperately needed for me. You see, I stretched myself too thin, trying to do too much for too many people and my own work started suffering. Things kept getting hairier and my posts became more infrequent and inconsistent. Then they stopped altogether, and the blog has been silent for over 6 months. Although it took me some time, I finally realized what was happening.

The more time and energy I spent on other people, the more I lost my own voice. My own self.










Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I don't want to help other people. Far from it. But the more effort I put into tracking down new authors to share and coercing them to let me spotlight them (which is ridiculous, if you think about it, and I'll explain why in a minute), the less I posted about stuff I wanted to post. Sure, I don't always have a lot to say every waking moment, but I do have a voice and I do have things to say. I have topics I want to talk about and an audience willing to listen to my nonsensical ramblings, but I wasn't using these things to my advantage. Instead, I put everything I had into making this blog into this ideal platform for new and unknown authors that I'd had in my head, and the harder I fought to make it happen, the less my hopes for this blog came to fruition. And the more the blog fought against me, the less interest I had in it.

Maybe this is just me being selfish, but I really had this idea that if I gave authors free publicity and a safe place to share their successes with people who actually want to hear about their stories, that word of mouth would spread and authors would start coming to me without me having to beg. I mean, as an author myself, I would go to blogs and beg them to host me on their pages. Often, they wanted me to pay them or would turn me down for one reason or another (hey, my books aren't everyone's cup of tea, and I'm totally okay with that!), but nobody came searching for me and asking me to be on their blog. Well, maybe once or twice, but suffice it to say getting any kind of promotion or publicity as a writer has always been my own responsibility. And when blogs offered me a spot without asking me to pay (a MAJOR pet peeve) I jumped at the opportunity. I didn't care how big or small the blog was, or what genre they typically worked with, or anything like that. Getting my name out there has always been my goal, whether it's to five or five hundred people. But it was getting harder and harder to get people on my blog. And when they agreed, they often backed out or just stopped responding to my emails. It's absolutely stupid.


So I sat back and asked myself WHY. WHY am I putting so much effort into hunting people down and begging them to let me have them on my blog? WHY am I letting people I don't know make me feel inadequate? I've decided no more. I've decided that if people want me to promote them, I'll be happy to, but I'm not begging or going out hunting anymore. Instead, I'm going to post things that matter to me, excerpts from my own writing, updates in my life, things I find cool, things I want to share with you, my ever-faithful readers and followers, and whenever another author wants promotion, I'll share that too.

I understand if you disagree with the new direction this blog will be heading, I'll hate to see you go, but I hope you understand that for the sake of my sanity and the future of this blog, I can't keep spreading myself thin and chasing down people who may not even want to be a part of this blog anyway. If I'm going to find my own voice again and keep posting to the blog, I'm going to have to take the selfish route and stop hunting down people to promote.





By no means does this mean I'm not going to host authors. I cannot express that enough. I still want to promote indie authors like myself. If you are or if you know an author who might want some free promotion, PLEASE fill out a contact form (or have the author you know fill one out) and I'll get back to you. But the majority of the upcoming posts will be me. I know I'm going to earn a few hate comments, but I'm prepared for that. I just hope you'll continue to follow the blog with the new changes.






~Ash