On the Uses of Blogs…

I’m not going to lie.  When I started this thing back in July of 2016, I wanted to quit my day job.

That’s right.  Non-viral short story based blogging, from scratch, as a career.  In like three months.

Unrealistic?  Oh my sweet fluffy bunny lord, yes.

You have to admit though, it has it’s appeal.  I wanted, even at the beginning, to make my bread and butter off nothing more than my imagination and my drive.  It turns out, that’s not an unrealistic goal.  What it has to be, what it cannot be anything less than, is a long term one.  The harsh reality is that I’m not going to make money off this here blogge.  Possibly ever.  Most of the money I make from writing will come from Amazon Kindle sales / reading compensation.  And that’s it.

So I’m left in kind of a pickle.  I have this website, I intend to keep this website, but it’s now a tertiary entity in the bigger scheme of my career.  It’s not that I don’t want to have a highly professional, well maintained, frequently updated online domain full of new ideas and new stories.  It’s not that I don’t want to continue developing content for this thing, and make new connections with readers through this medium.  It’s just that there are approximately eight hojillion other blogs, all vying for the same things that I am, but going about it in a far more acceptable “buzz feed” fashion.

This leaves me with two choices: I can either abandon the blog altogether, or I can go ahead and forge onward with it under a new set of expectations.  It’s not that the realities of the situation have changed any.  There hasn’t suddenly been a resurgence of desire to read a blog about writing and short stories.  But I honestly and sincerely want my career to be writing.  I want to create things for my wages, not just mindlessly consume them.  I wish to feel proud of what I do every day.  I wish to be my own boss, and hold myself accountable.  I want my overly harsh self criticisms to actually be productive for a change.  For that to happen, I have to write. 

I’m gonna level with you: Over the last few months, my writing has gotten very bad.  I was handed an opportunity to rest my heels at the day job, and I failed to do anything productive with it.  In fact, I did the opposite.  I actually lost ground on being an author during that time.  I lost motivation, direction, and to a small degree I lost hope for myself as an author.  It’s not fun to have periods like that.  So I want to fix it.  And it just so happens that I’ve had the solution right in front of me the whole time. 

So today I am rechristening the blog.  It’s full use and function will be as a vehicle for me to force myself to generate new ideas, write in new tones, and capture the essence and focus of what it means for one Justin G Wallace to pursue authorship.  It shall also serve as a form of literary exercise, again forcing me to actively create content on a daily basis outside of Temple in the Stars.  So in essence, to use it exactly as I was using it before.  However, reasons matter.  Motivation is wholly subject to the whims of the mind that tries to wield it.  The same objective can have two vastly different outcomes depending on how properly the mind is motivated to approach it.  It’s important, especially for someone trying to use their imagination as a source of income, to make sure that the mental attitude and outlook are correct. 

With further mental realignments,
Justin