A WRITER’S GOTTA DO WHAT A WRITER’S …

This morning I spotted an article entitled, “Do Authors really need to blog?” I tried to ignore it, truly I did, but it bared its teeth and barked at me until I rolled over and submitted. Even whimpering about being too busy didn’t work. I read it.

When I began blogging more than a year ago I was inspired. I wrote every other day. I couldn’t wait to do it again. And again. So I really identified with the first point in the article: ‘Some people try to blog daily, and many of them are eventually carried off in white vans with padded interiors.’  The thing was, I could kid myself it didn’t matter if I wasn’t getting on with my novel, or the story for next week’s writing group, because I was still writing wasn’t I? But blogging was so much fun and so quickly achieved in comparison with my other writing that I simply wasn’t doing anything else. And the longer I left my other writing, the harder it was to return to it. Pretty soon I was ready for that white van through sheer frustration and guilt.  

But now I’m being told all the reasons why I should, indeed must blog (I feel rather like a sugar addict being told that one cream biscuit won’t hurt me). Those reasons, of course, are all to do with building a platform to promote my name and get my books published. The name thing is important. Apparently, the first thing a publisher does when presented with a query letter from an unknown author is google his/her name. That presented a problem for me because my blog goes out under the pen name of Arrowhead.  It seems I really need a blog under my own name. There’s even an exercise to find out how my name presently appears (or not) on the web.

So, I must zip, to quote the words of a recently retired Australian politician. I’m about to search for my name on http://google.com/ncr.