Hello all! If you take a look around, you’ll notice that I have been tinkering with the site a bit! I have a new static landing page, and I have added other pages as well. Don’t worry! The blog is still running and will be easy enough to find under the “Blog” tab. And if you subscribe by email you’ll be sent directly to the new post anyway, without having to navigate anywhere.
However, I’d love it if you folks took a look around when you have a chance. As mentioned in my previous post, I have gone ahead and added an information page specifically for freelance editing, for which I am now open. Even if you yourselves are not in need of such services, I would greatly appreciate if you could share the word with any writer-type friends who might be!
In addition, as you may see in the “Featured” column on the Home page, in the coming days/weeks I will be adding a separate page/tab for my personal writings (not blog posts or book reviews, but poetry, snippets of fiction, and creative nonfiction kinds of things). AND I will be linking to a new little side project shop I am in the process of putting together on Etsy.
In the meantime, you can definitely still expect a full book review post from me this upcoming Friday!
(Also, I’m not entirely happy with the header image still, so that will likely continue to change for awhile.)
Hello folks! I just have a few updates this week. We have officially hit December and the holiday season, and there are only 5 Fridays left in the year (including today). I know! I’m shocked and horrified by this as well. I hope everyone is having fun preparing for their various holiday-season traditions (there are so many holidays in so many religions and cultures around the world this time of year, it’s pretty amazing!) And I hope that the concurrent issues of shopping, travel, dealing with family, etc don’t stress anyone out too badly (they always stress me out plenty).
As we are nearing the end of the year, and all that entails, I wanted to give you heads up that weekly posts will probably be a bit spotty this month. I have one book review in draft right now, that I will probably post next week. And I am planning to do a “My Favorite Reads of the Year” list in time for the New Year. That might be it from me for the month. I suspect most people aren’t going to mind too much; they have other things to worry about besides reading my blog posts, lol. But I apologize for the slow-down anyway.
In other news, I am considering starting to take on freelance editing work – this kind of editing (developmental and copy/line-editing) is usually for folks who are preparing to indie or self-publish, but can be useful even for those planning to submit manuscripts to agents/editors in traditional publishing. I have done some editing work in the past, but it has always been for friends, or friends of friends, for small amounts of money or pro bono. I have recently picked up a couple new potential clients (we’re still hammering out confirmations) based on word-of-mouth, and it has made me think I might like to try making it more official. I might post the information as a page here, or possibly make a full website landing page for everything. But in any case, if this is something anyone out there has been looking into for a project, feel free to contact me!
I am also thinking about some things I would like to do for the blog starting in the new year.
The blog I ran in the height of the blog-popularity from 2011-2015 or so was not huge — I didn’t have thousands of readers or anything — but it did fairly well. It had around 500 subscribers, lots of comments, averaged a couple thousand hits a week, etc. This new one doesn’t get a fraction of that engagement. I know the blogging heyday is past. I can’t expect anything like that again, but it’s still disheartening. I keep wondering if writing this blog is like screaming into a void that no one else hears or cares about, and I would be better off just redirecting this writing time/energy back toward my own personal writing. On the other hand, I do enjoy writing these little book reviews, and my main goal originally was to help support and spread the word about books/authors that I really love. I’m just not sure I’m even doing that if NO ONE reads these (except for DirtyBuddha, the only reader who consistently looks at/likes every post! Shout out to you! Thanks!)
On top of all that, I’ve had ideas for things I wanted to write/talk about that I haven’t yet because, as few readers I have now, I fear that people will care even less about these other things. Most of them are still book-related (though not all), but they aren’t book reviews and if that’s what most of my readers (few as they are) are here for it would feel like a waste of time to even sit down to type these other ideas out. The problem stems, I think, from the fact that I have advanced degrees in literature but I stopped teaching and I feel like I have all this information and all these niche interests floating around my head with no useful outlet.
I talked to my best friend about that a bit, and she gave me some good advice that kind of boiled down to: don’t worry about what others think. On one level, that’s kind of the point of a blog, to share content that you think/hope others will engage with, so you kind of have to care. On another level, though, she’s right. If the blog is for me, for talking about things I’m interested in (even if it’s aimed at an empty void), then does it really matter? And, she said, maybe you’ll write a post that will show up on someone’s google search someday, for someone with the same niche interests who never thought anyone else had ever written about the topic before, and even if that’s the only reader you ever get for that post, won’t it be nice to be there for the one person who really wanted to read it?
It’s a nice thought. Though it still begs the question of how much time and energy I should pour into this blog, and how much of that time is a waste that should be aimed at things that will have more long-term benefits (like finishing one of my damn novels).
In any case, it’s something I’ve been thinking about. Some of the things I’ve been thinking about writing about include an old course syllabus idea I had for (anti)war novels, and one for planetary romances, and one for time travel narratives. While these would all at least still be book lists/discussions, it feels like people only care about new/recent releases these days, so I don’t know that anyone would care about reading lists of mostly-classics. I also have thoughts on indulging some more of anime nerdiness – for instance, I’ve considered writing about Robotech (an American dub/adaptation of a Japanese anime that aired in 1985, and one of my personal obsessions). I’ve also thought about writing about art more. And I’ve had a grand idea for a big essay about an obscure 1940s novel called The Journal of Albion Moonlight bouncing around my head for years. So yeah, the ideas are ALL OVER THE PLACE.
I suppose what I’m saying is that these are things that might happen in 2023, but I’m not certain yet, because despite my best friend’s assurances that it’s my blog and I can do what I want with it, I’m still a bit tired of screaming into an empty void. If anyone has an opinion in one direction or the other, please feel free to comment.
My final announcement is a big one for me personally. For the first time in TWELVE YEARS, I have successfully “won”/completed the NaNoWriMo challenge! I cannot tell you how excited I am to finally accomplish this again after so many attempts! I actually hit the official word count goal, 50k words, on Monday, November 28th. And then I spent the last two days of the month seeing if I could stretch that word count a bit before Nano was officially over. I finally ended up with: 55,828 words, nearly 6k over the word goal!
So yeah, I’m pretty stoked about that!
Anyway, that’s a lot of information and ideas to throw at you all so I’ll stop talking now. If anyone has any opinions/feelings on any of this, please feel free to comment! In the meantime, have a good weekend and happy “start of December and the mad-rush to the new year” season, everyone!
A lot of my friends write long, thoughtful “year-in-review” letters to send to all their friends and family around Christmas or New Year’s. I’ve never entirely understood this, and I’ve often wondered if it’s a midwest thing (having gone to high school and undergrad in Kansas City, most of my friends are from the midwest). No one in my immediate or extended family has ever done this in my entire life, and it is something I had never been exposed to until my high school friends started doing it.
I don’t write these sorts of letters myself. Frankly, my life is not interesting enough to write about, and a lot of things that I would include in such a letter are not necessarily things I need/want everyone to know about. The friends/family that I feel comfortable sharing such information with already know.
But I sometimes wonder why I don’t share the bad things, the problems, the embarrassing bits more freely, like I see so many of my friends do online – whether it be twitter or facebook or a blog or whatever. There are a few reasons, of course. First, I have an extremely high capacity for embarrassment. The smallest things mortify me. Seeing other people do or say something embarrassing mortifies me. There are entire movies and tv shows I am physically incapable of watching because the second embarrassment is genuinely painful to me. So there’s that. There is also the problem, as always, of not wanting to share my problems for fear of being accused of whining, or of trying to garner pity, or some such thing. And on top of all that, I am constantly fighting the conflicting desires of wanting people to care while also not wanting them to worry.
For the most part, I don’t much care what strangers think of me. I can share thoughts and feelings anonymously on twitter or tumblr or where-ever without much concern. I can give talks at conferences without undue levels of terror (I mean, there’s always SOME terror, this is me after all), because I know I will never see most of these people again. But I balk at the idea of telling some of these things to people I really know, people I will have to face. Hell, half the time I cannot even stand the idea of letting a friend or colleague read something I wrote – no matter how much I trust that friend or colleague. The room full of conference attendees doesn’t matter. YOU all do. And so I cannot stand to face judgment, even the gentlest and kindest of judgments. Mine is a very fragile ego, all told. I have low self-esteem even on my best days. And let’s be honest, the last few years have not been my best days.
A few years ago, I started an anonymous blog for the expressed purpose of writing about my depression and my bad days. I very carefully avoided any possibility of my name being attached to it. Created a new email address for it, used no names, never mentioned it to a single friend, did not share links on social media. The people who found it, who found me there, were people who identified with the topics, the subject matter, the tags I used. I stopped posting there ages ago (abandoning a blog for not the first time). It’s still there though. I didn’t delete it. But no, I will not tell you what it was called or how to find it. There are still things on that blog I could never stand certain people to read. Ever.
All that being said, I have decided to try this again. This public blogging thing. Obviously. Being as open and honest I can stand to be.
Amanda Haimoto Rudd 