I started a blog on Wordpress back in 2018. Everyone said that an author had to have a proper website with its own url and there were lots of technical stuff about affiliations and things that I quite frankly have never truly understood. I just wanted to write.
I've written thousands of words on Wordpress since then, in over six hundred posts. If you count the ones that you can see, the number is a lot less than that, nearer two hundred, as some have been removed to go into books or have been duplicated or I've decided that I'm not bothered with them anymore. And I've never really clicked with Wordpress. I more or less clicked with Blogger, where I've been blogging in a non-monetised, random, unfocused way about my life for over a decade. Blogger is free, my subscription to my Wordpress account isn't, and at one point I started thinking. When I was looking to make graphics in Canva (without using the AI because I'm scared of it), I found this and downloaded it unaltered. It feels like cheating, but it's a perfect expression of this stage.
Back in January, I chose the word Mindful for the year. Of course, for the first few months I forgot all about it, but eventually I started thinking. My writing set up was anything but mindful. It was scattered, chaotic, and it wasn't producing good work. Take, for example, The Guest. You can't read any of it at time of typing, because I've taken it all down ready for it to be converted into a novel on Amazon, but it's a good example of how things were working. It sort of started as part of the November writing challenge on Royal Road which had sprung from a rejected submission that I'd made to a vegan magazine, then ended up being a weekly post on my blog, and I bunged it on Substack as well as my blog, because why not, and by the end it was all over the place. I wrote the last chapter ten months after I wrote the first, plots weren't as cohesive as I would have liked, and I couldn't go back and add in bits, because the story was already set in stone on four sites - by the end it was Blogger, Wordpress, Substack, and Royal Road. Not only that, but it involved scheduling, adding to compilation menus, digging out pictures from Unsplash or Canva, and generally not playing to my strengths. It wasn't very Mindful.
If you look back, past the month long Halloween posts and bits of The Guest, you will be able to see a trail of me turning away from my past working habits. This is the next step. I will no longer be posting on Wordpress after this post, apart from occasional reminders that I don't live here anymore. You can find me at lyssa-medana.blogspot.com, still called Always Another Chapter, or you could sign up to my Substack, which I'll be treating as a newsletter with chat and news. There may be occasional bits of fiction, a few articles on research and maybe a review or two, but nothing like the mostly regular Monday posts. Those weekly posts have given me The White Hart and Kane in An Apprenticeship of Ghosts, and I'm grateful. But I can do better. Instead of those posts, I hope to focus on writing longer stories in a more cohesive form.
There's also a part of me that is tired of failing with the blog. A few weeks ago I wanted to add some stories about creatures to add to the Halloween selection, but it didn't happen and instead other pieces were added. Stepping Mindfully away from making promises and sharing plans that aren't already cemented in is a way to protect my mental balance and I'm tired of failing and missing schedules.
There's still a lot of chaos going on. My Royal Road account has gone, and I'll be taking down a lot of fiction, including Invitation Accepted and the stories that I posted throughout October, on 30th November. I'm working on getting the stories into novel form and onto Amazon and I'll post on Blogger and Substack when that happens. A certain amount of chaos continues, of course. I'm going to have to go over every single one of my published pieces and amend the contact details, and I'm going to have to chase up all my social media profiles and update them as well. I've got a heap of ideas, and I'm working to make space to get them out and fit to be seen. I guess that the next few months will still be overflowing with crazy juice. I think that I ought to feel sad that I won't be posting about it on Wordpress anymore, after all this time. I suppose you could call it the end of an era, if eight years is an era. Instead, I'm feeling ready for the next adventure - wherever I post it!
Let me know if you have any comments, thoughts or ideas. I'd love to hear from you.
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