To Blog Or Not To Blog...

I resolved to update this blog on a regular basis in 2013. So far, I am not doing well. I have, however, spent a great deal of time debating with myself if I should blog at all.

As writers, we are told that we must blog in order to build an audience or an 'author platform'. This is probably a valid concept. My issue is that there are 92.8 million writers who are blogging for mostly this reason alone. I know this because I read quite a few of them each day when I should be spending my time writing!

Don't worry... I'm sure this next part isn't about you!

The majority of the writers' blog posts deal with some 'cutting edge' topic, by which I mean a writing adage we have all heard a million times like 'Show Don't Tell' or 'Your characters have to be real!", and waste 500-1000 words telling us absolutely nothing new on the topic. That isn't to say there are not some very good blogs on writing, but the percentage of those is tiny. I don't blame the 99.5% of writing blogs that add nothing new, because if I did update my blog 2-3 times a week on the topic of writing I would be doing the exact same thing. But...

When I forward myself a link from my phone, open it up on my PC, spend 2 minutes reading it to find it is drivel I am often left feeling pretty stabby. The real crime is that they are spamming my twitter TL several times a day or many times a week advertising the same dreadful post. The biggest crime of all is when the blogger uses different snippets from the blog in their tweets so you cannot be sure if it is a post you've already wasted time on or some new rubbish!

So instead of adding to the noise level and being another 'not great' blog on writing, or worse a waste of writers' time, I am not going to update this blog regularly. I will continue to waste more of my time than I should reading bad blogs on writing, and when I read a good one I will retweet a link so you won't have to dredge through the sludge with me each day.

All that said, I will occasionally come back and bang out a piece here if there is something I feel I can add on a topic. Or something I feel passionately enough about to be the one spamming other peoples twitter feeds about several times a week. Thanks for wasting two minutes of your time here; now quit reading and starting writing!