Blogging Once a Week, Paying it Forward, and the Benefits of an Online Presence
So you’ve probably noticed my posts have gotten a lot less frequent of late. Belated apologies–I know how frustrating it can be to follow a blog that doesn’t update all that often.
But my reasons are sound:
- Librarian duties are compounded during fall semester, particularly at my institution–leaving much less time and energy in the evenings to blog. But, my efforts haven’t been in vain–I got the following feedback from a faculty member yesterday (from an email sent to my supervisor that I was copied on):
- Secondly, after some tremendous feedback from some lovely beta readers (you know who you are), I’ve been spending evenings that I usually reserve for blogging revising two of my manuscripts to make them top-notch–and the developments have been really exciting. I got the following feedback from a beta reader earlier this week:
I thought about going dark completely over the next few months, particularly while I’m honing my skills and my craft–but I’d still like to put out updates as often as I can, especially if they might prove helpful to others. Janice Hardy does this best on her blog–and I’ll be featuring her in an interview in coming weeks. Her entry on internalization also helped me in my most recent revisions. Another good post, “The Biggest Mistake Writers Make” helped me a ton and can be found here.
So if you’re a blogger, even if you aren’t yet published, keep at it, particularly if you have content that’s interesting and helpful to your readers. Just don’t do it at the expense of your writing.
Congrats on getting that good feedback! I've been deliberately spending less time on social media and went through withdrawals–kept feeling like I HAD to be missing something–but it was necessary to make some good writing progress.
I was kind of apologetic to everyone at first. “Sorry I haven't been commenting as much, or blogging or tweeting as much” but then I thought, why am I apologizing for writing my book?
We all have to find that balance, right?
That is so true! I came to the conclusion (with the help of some well-informed people) that having an online platform is great, but there needs to be book writing to back it up! It's very easy to say “Well, I'm forwarding my writing career by writing a blog,” but you're right–sometimes taking a break from social networks is nececssary to make progress writing!