I’m noticing that I haven’t posted to this blog for months. Last post date was – actually, I don’t even know without checking. (And I’m writing this post in a word processor, not in the Wordpress interface, so I’m not even looking at the site just now.)
(Edit: August 16th – almost 3 months!)
So in the spirit of the “process blog” thing, let’s try writing a blog post about why I’m not writing blog posts.
The first part is depression.
Yeah, right now, I’m still off work (as of the beginning of July) and I’m personally not expecting to be back at work this year. That’s kind of… weird to admit to, and weird to feel relatively calm about. Okay, so I need the time to recover from whatever it is that I’m recovering from. I’m kind of accepting that right now. And accepting that the recovery will happen, in its own sweet time.
And the depression makes it hard to do much of anything – including write. That’s tough. I signed up for NaNoWriMo in order to try to force myself to write, but I’m not holding myself to the full 50,000 words in 30 days. It seems too much right now. So I’m committing to writing something each day on this new piece of fiction I’ve started, and we’ll see what we have on the 30th of November.
So that’s the first reason and it’s totally legitimate and I’m kind of okay with it, even though I’m not okay with the not-writing-blog-posts. (I want to write more. I don’t want to say I intend to, ’cause I can’t seem to commit to very much right now, but we will see, okay?)
The second reason feels a bit less legitimate and a bit more complicated.
When I was first off sick, I was toying with the idea of quitting my job. (In fact, I’m still toying with the idea. But it’s on the back burner.) Or at the very least, reducing my hours. And because of that, I was looking at other income streams. And one of the potential income streams I thought about was this blog.
To the end of trying to get some money out of the blog, I signed up for three affiliate programmes, and started the process of changing the links (which linked to the things I was affiliate-ing anyway) all around here to my affiliate links instead of the ordinary kind.
I then got totally squicked out about it, stopped the changing, and haven’t posted to this blog since!
Argh. That totally wasn’t the effect I meant to have. Either on myself, or on my readers.
I guess I was concerned that I didn’t want to be trying to squeeze money out of innocent readers who didn’t come here to be sold to. And I didn’t want to sell – still don’t, in fact. I was concerne about money, and I can still be concerned about money, but I didn’t want to do something so not-transparent as changing all the links on my blog without telling anyone about it.
Right now, it’s kind of pot luck, so you may or may not be earning me a few pennies if you click on a link from this site, and then buy something. I will probably be changing all the links back to non-affiliate links – at some point when I can be bothered to do the admin. That’s not now, though.
If I do decide to “go affiliate” at some point in the future, there’ll be a blog post about it, and I won’t suddenly start trying to encourage my readers to buy stuff. That’s not how I roll and it’s not what I want to do, and officially? Ick.
If I’m going to do something other than what I do now for a living, probably I’m going to need to start thinking about money. And maybe this blog could at some point become a source of income for me. But I’ll have to find a way to do it that doesn’t make me feel gross – or cover my blog with advertisements. Because, ew.
I think my next post might be about rituals. Or play. Or saying no. Or one of the other three million things I’m trying to figure out.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey! Good to see you writing again! I know it can be hard to come back after a long-ish break in posting, and I’m really glad you did it. I’m looking forward to reading about the three million and three things you have on your mind!
It can be so hard to do such minimal tasks when battling depression. How can you make yourself write when you barely dragged your butt into a shower that day? I understand. You can do it though!!
As for the affiliate links, choose things you wouldn’t mind clicking on yourself when reading a blog. Also, most of your regular readers will likely subscribe to your RSS and never see those ads (unless you use Google Ad Sense for Feeds… which, btw, isn’t bad to look at either). I think most people pretty much expect to see aff links or ads on just about any website these days, so don’t feel badly about. Do what you need to do.