Don’t worry, the blog probably won’t turn into this. Probably.
So The Art of Thor will come back next week, when I’m not so out of practice with StarCraft 2 and am back to my normal schedule of writing on the train and not wasting two hours in the car screaming at douchenozzles driving BMWs who think they bought the road along with their pretentious Bluetooth headsets and designer shirts monogrammed with the initials BIYM,
In other words, it’s on hiatus.
That strikes me as a somewhat dirty word for fiction writers. Going on hiatus means an interruption of the story. It means your audience is left hanging. And unless they’re deeply invested in your narrative or the characters, they’re going to go elsewhere for their entertainment, and you may have some trouble bringing them back.
The alternative is delivering a sub-standard product.
Think about it. If you don’t have the proper preparation, breathing room and time to edit and revise what you’re working on, if you shove it out the door just to shove something out the door, there’s no guarantee it’s going to be any good. And if you want to hold onto your audience, you’ll have to deliver quality, not just quantity. There are approximately 1.34 bajillion blogs, story sites and author portals on the Internet, and most of them aren’t dispensing anything all that new or interesting. Now, this isn’t to disparage any of the authors whom I’ve read and even worked with in the past. But it’s a fact, and here’s an example off the top of my head. The law of averages states that for every Chuck Wendig or Machine Age or JR Blackwell there’s between 5 and 5000 substandard hacks trying to push their schlock onto the teeming masses.
Hell, I might even be one of them, but that’s beside the point.
The point is, you won’t get anywhere or hold onto an ever-growing audience if you don’t give them something worth reading or watching. Doing that takes time. Time isn’t going to just saunter up to you and sit in your lap for you to take advantage of, either. You have to go after it. Chuck goes into detail about this and in a way that probably isn’t quite so indicative of his libido. Although one never knows.
So you need to take time to go about your entertainment the right way. And sometimes that means taking time away from other endeavors like ‘regular’ blog features or playing video games or training yourself to be the next dog whisperer. Given my schedule and the ways in which I’m trying to change & take charge of it, that’s meant getting some things in order and working around other events, and while the dust is settling and the end of a touch of darkness is in sight, there’s still going to be chaos here for a day or two.
In other words, the hiatus isn’t necessarily bad and Art of Thor is taking one til next week.
