April 30, 2011

Absence makes the readers go away

Well, my hiatus is coming to a near end. I have finished my thesis and am now awaiting suggestions for revisions from two university professors who act as my first and second readers. Essentially the hard stuff is done. I’m prepared to appear in the public reading phase on May 4, 2011 – a bit of a nerve wracking appearance as I read a portion of the novel to the university community and friends and family in a public forum.

The pros of writing to this deadline:
One thing I learned through the blitz writing that I have had to do and re-do for this thesis is that you really can come up with a decent framework on deadline to work from in later drafts. In fact, pushing myself so hard resulted in hitting the 32% mark (out of 80,000 words).

The cons of writing to this deadline:
The deadline created tremendous anxiety for me with regard to finishing in time to receive my MA before the university community on whole goes off on their summer-long vacations. It also highly impacted my personal life – after working all day and going to school three nights per week, obliterated almost all of the my free time.

The impact on blogging:
Clearly, the impact on blogging is that I had to be absent from both this blog and my genealogy blog … more so from the genealogy blog since I did post a book review to this site while on hiatus (I never stop reading no matter what). My absence brought down views of this blog to zero many days, where it had previously see quite a bit of traffic. The blog most impacted, however, was my genealogy blog – where I had as many as 60 hits per day on that blog, traffic slowed to single digit numbers and I even had two days with no traffic at all.

The final analysis:
… there’s that analytical mind again … I see blogging as an expression of my writing and my genealogy research. Having to put those outlets on hold, will cause an uphill battle to gain momentum again and get my readers back. Last lesson, never stop blogging – just one weekly post gives your readers something to enjoy and increases the volume on your website.

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