On New Year’s Day, I drove past two large groups of cyclists; perhaps two dozen all told.
The following day, I passed 6 joggers, not a one of them daunted by a cold winter drizzle.
Even in a fitness-conscious community like Chapel Hill, these are statistical anomalies. The explanation, naturally, is New Year’s. If you visit a YMCA this week, you will find it packed with rigorous exercisers. Weight lifters, treadmill joggers, swimmers, tennis players, cardio fiends.
By April, they will be gone.
New Year’s resolutions aren’t permanent. This is why you shouldn’t make them: you should set goals. Year round.
This year, I’m making zero “resolutions”, but I do have goals. An ongoing goal from prior years is to become published in fiction.
This has led me to make two counter-intuitive, or “reverse” resolutions:
- To blog less.
- To get rejected by publishers more.
These both sound bad, don’t they? Like I’m striving to be lazier, less productive, or lower the quality of my work.
The first resolution is especially strange. Time and again I’ve renewed the blog, came to the table with new columns, new schedules, new requirements to impose upon myself.
These were in part due studying what makes blogs successful for career bloggers. I even met a guy last year who explained, in detail, how to take a blog from zero to hero: 3 readers to 3,000. I was following much of his advice, as well as common sense. Guidelines like post regularly, post on time, determine specific topics.
All good advice.
But the truth is, I have no interest in being a career blogger. Generating additional readership via the blog would be a nice bonus, but the people who blog full-time are doing what they wanted to do. I would much rather have my work garner readers who then stop by the blog — if they want.
So I am ignoring all the advice and methodology for generating blog readers. This blog is not to make me a successful blogger; it’s to keep my fiction and non-fiction readers informed about current projects.
What I want is to write fiction, and tying myself to blog columns takes time and effort away from fiction. So it’s out. Gone.
I will post when I post, and it will be on whatever I want to write. If people like it, fine. If they don’t, who cares? Those who really want to know will RSS me and so it won’t matter if I post every Wednesday or once a year.
The second Reversolution, to get rejected more, is probably more understandable. No writer has ever broken in without rejection. And often, the more numerous or harsh the rejections, the better the later career.
The fact that I’m not getting rejected more is proof that I am simply not submitting enough. So the goal isn’t actually rejection: It’s publication.
But rejection is a reality. All of the most successful authors have been rejected, some of them thousands of times. It’s time for me to get on the same track.
