Jeremy C Kester

I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Day after day, week after week has passed by and besides a poem and an occasional short story, my blog has gone on empty. But yet, I am not sure that I am at all upset about this.

It’s been slowly dying for a few months. At least since late last year I’ve been largely ignoring my site. Granted, I don’t believe that abandoning my site is a good idea. In today’s world, a good website is a must-have.  I don’t have a good website, but I at least have one. And it does need work.

I’ve thought repeatedly about curating my blog more, about putting more posts up. But then again, why? Why was I trying to write more blog posts? For me? Or was it more that I felt that I had to? For me, it has always been the latter. I wrote on my blog in large part because I felt that writing in a blog was the right thing to do. I’d play as though I wanted to do that, like the writing was great practice (it is) and that I enjoyed the activity; however, the truth was that it took a lot of time and energy that I could ill afford. In the end, it would contribute to my getting burned out, or I allowed it to steal time away from more important tasks, tasks such as editing, revising, and marketing.

There is a part of me that wants to write columns, essays, and the like. Blogging is a different animal. Blogging is part essay writing, part journal, part whatever the hell someone wants to make it. I could spend the time tailoring it to what I want to make it. I could make the effort to shift the blog away from the mess that it has been to make it into something more worthwhile, not only for me as a writer, but for you as the reader. Who wants to read any work, fiction or blog or essay, that the writer isn’t putting their heart into? Readers are far more astute than that. Readers can sniff disingenuous writing out like a blood hound to the kill.

Writing doesn’t come easy to me. It’s a chore that I have to fight for time to do. Most of my writing is done on stolen time, or by sacrificing other things that I might enjoy. Want to play a video game? Sorry, there’s writing to be had. Hang out with my family? Writing first! And it isn’t only time that I struggle with.

I approach writing with a curious mind. I never assume that what I write is gold, or even pyrite. (Maybe pyrite… I am a fool.) Writing is a process, one that I should expect constant learning and struggle from. Making it harder on myself by trying to keep up on blogging has made it more challenging than it needs to be. At least in certain areas.

Where I am getting at is that I need to get myself straightened out again, and worrying about this whole blogging thing has been getting in the way of where I need my energies. I’ve gone too far astray on my habits with regards to my fiction to a point that I am virtually stalled. And having only published a singular short story since December 2016, I am in need of getting myself on track. That’s a little over 3 years now that I’ve been inactive. But hey, I’ve been fighting to keep coming back to my blog! See where this is going?

I need to set my website aside to a point. I need to work on my fiction, on getting books written, edited, revised, rewritten, edited again, beta-read, etc. Blogging can’t be a distraction.

In a way I guess I’ve given up, hence the title of this little tirade. I am giving up on maintaining any sense of regularity to posting blogs on my site. It will go to random. In other words, I’ll post something when I have this urge to blog that I can’t ignore. It will remain an afterthought of sorts otherwise.

As far as my posting a poem on Wednesday and a short story on Friday (that I also struggle to keep up with), they will go on as they are. I’ve been writing at least one poem a day for a bit now and the short stories I post for Free Fiction Fridays are experiments, warm-ups, and practice, so they will be more common than a blog, maybe not every week, or even every other week, but far more common.

Count today as the last one for a while. I don’t know when I’ll be back on here with another blog post. Maybe tomorrow; maybe next year. In the meantime, know that it is for good reason. Know that it is so that I focus on what is truly important to me.