After testing the waters and giving it some thought, I’ve decided that I am not going to make the effort to try and find a third party to publish my writing. Ultimately, I write for myself, and I don’t really need the endorsement of a third party to make me feel any better or worse about what I produce. It certainly would be nice to be published, but the overall pay-off doesn’t really seem to me to be worth the effort. Crucially, it takes time away from writing itself, which is far more rewarding than the hard work of submitting work for consideration.
So, why do I share what I write on this blog?
The opportunity cost of publishing my work on this blog is pretty low and well worth the chance — however faint in a world with over 600 million blogs — of finding one or two readers who enjoy what I have written, benefit from it, and take the time to let me know. More ambitiously, by sharing my work, I might even connect with a kindred spirit and potential collaborator. That would be a fun and rewarding outcome of sharing my writing here and well worth the time of copying and pasting it from one file to another.
In fact, when I first set up this blog, many years ago, that was the original plan: take advantage of the new and free tech to stick my work somewhere someone might stumble across and enjoy it. For better and for worse, I’ve tested a bunch of different approaches for this blog since that first post, and, with the benefit of hindsight, it isn’t surprising to me that I have returned to the original plan. With the benefit of that very same hindsight, I also know that I learned a lot by testing those different approaches which means it was time well spent, even if I have ended up exactly where I began. The game loop is straightforward, but the rewards are satisfying. I guess that’s why I keep playing.
Once more into the breach!
MOVEMENT 