A Short Blogging Story

I have been getting extremely blogweary over the last few weeks. Regular readers might have noticed the slowdown in my production and I can only apologize if this has disappointed them. It will probably get worse, not better, I assure you.

It's not just the weariness, you see. I did not realize what was happening at first, but it has become clear that my blog strategy is under review. For a start, I am sick of hearing my own opinion. My ideas are so weird that they may be quite entertaining to others but, since I already know them, to me it sounds like stating the obvious. And I am not interested in sparking controversy for its own sake; there's enough argument in the blogosphere without me adding to the din.

So it is unlikely that I will do any more opinion posts. My thoughts on the American experience have also dwindled as I spend more time in front of the computer and less out there in the real world. What am I left with? Fiction.

And there is the crux of the matter. Fiction is what I really want to do and is the ultimate purpose of the blog. The trouble is that the blog has taken up so much of my time that I have been unable to work on the books that insist upon being written. The marketing has overtaken production.

Obviously, I need to decrease the amount of time I spend blogging and concentrate more on writing. I do not want to abandon the blog completely; it has been useful practice and enabled me to establish links with other writers and friends whose input has been very valuable to me. But a decrease in output is inevitable.

At the moment, I see my way forward as posting short stories only. This sounds reasonable but is not quite as straightforward as that. Stories do not appear on demand. They stem from ideas that occur haphazardly and cannot be forced. So, if I pursue this course, posting will become irregular. There might be purple patches where the stories suggest themselves frequently but it is far more likely that there will be long periods of silence in between each post.

Understand, I am still thinking about this. It is tantamount to accepting that the blog has failed in its original intent: to attract attention from agents and publishers. I am reluctant to give up on that as yet. My hope is that I can think of some form of posting to intersperse with the short stories and thereby continue to update regularly. That remains to be seen, however.

While on the subject of short stories, I must mention that I have heard several times recently that it's a dead genre in the publishing world. This makes no sense to me. I would have thought that the short story is the ideal format for the modern world where attention spans are limited, reading skills poor and the pace of life dictates that people rush from one activity to the next. How much sense does it make that readers are prepared to put in the effort to read a complete novel but not a short story?

I must presume that the publishers know their market, however. For whatever reason, it seems that people will not buy collections of short stories anymore. So they will miss the enjoyment I had as a child on reading my mother's copy of The Best Short Stories of O. Henry. They will never discover the genius of Zane Grey through such short stories as Tappan's Burro and Yaqui. And who knows what great modern writers of short stories are being ignored by the publishers and, through them, the reading public?

The thought occurs to me that blogging may be the last refuge and perhaps the means to survival of the short story. It is, after all, the only form of fiction suited to so transient a medium. Who reads a novel online? Only the most dedicated and determined of readers, I suspect. But a short story that asks no more than twenty minutes of a reader's time has a far better chance of being read, surely.

In the end, it does not matter to me whether these thoughts are correct or not. Short stories are what I want to post and it's my blog so that is what will happen. If they are read, great; if not, what have I lost?

This post is partly an apology for irregular posts of late but also a quest for input. If you have any thoughts on the matters raised, I would be only too grateful to receive them through the comments system. Thanks for reading!

Technorati tags: Fiction; Short stories; Blogging.