My Maiden Blog Post: Welcome to My World (Ether Edition)

I was attending a webinar the other day on one of the things I hate to do more than anything—marketing. Fortunately, one of the marketing strategies that was mentioned in the webinar sounded like something I might actually enjoy doing—writing a blog.

So, this is it! I’m launching a blog starting right here, right now. I’m hoping that, for me, it’s both a marketing chore that I don’t hate with a red-hot passion and a way to express myself that takes some of the pressure off of my beleaguered husband. For you, I’m hoping my blog is informative, entertaining, and/or serves as an awesome procrastination tool that allows you to get out of doing something else. 

I’m thinking I’ll write about: writing (to give you those coveted behind-the-scenes looks at how a novel is brought into being); marketing (to vent—humorously, of course—about all the godawful things an indie author has to do to keep their book out of the digital dustbin); living with depression (because sometimes the best way to deal with depression is to scream about it, plus I’ve found that people really respond well to writers who talk about the mental illness shit that so many of us live with but feel like we can’t fucking talk about); and possibly, politics (sparingly, I promise, because it’s currently more depressing than my actual depression).

So, this is my maiden blog post. Welcome to my world (ether edition). Note: As you’ve already discovered, there will be swearing. I will try to keep it to a minimum, but talking about living with depression is like talking about living with cancer. It just can’t be done effectively without a few F-words thrown in. Because: Fuck depression. (And cancer too, for that matter.)

Since this blog has come about as a reaction to the hell that is book marketing, I’ll start there.

Those of you who know me personally know that I retired from my day job at the end of 2024 so I could follow my dream of becoming an author. I did this because I truly love writing novels—and I had completed five of them by that time. Which is good because I found that once I got mired in the marketing morass, I no longer had the creative or emotional energy to write. Granted, I knew that being an indie author would not be easy. Indie authors have to do it all. They have to be author, publisher, and marketing professional. I knew it would be hard. I did not know how hard.

Sadly, most authors (much like their readers, come to think of it) are introverts. We are the wallflowers of the artistic continuum. Marketing, however, is an extroverted profession, but that’s only part of why I’ve learned to hate it (more on that in coming blogs). Fortunately, along the continuum that is marketing—writing a blog is downright introverted. I’m hoping it will remind me of the good old days when I wrote a weekly humor column for an alternative newspaper. Without the annoying press deadline, of course. That column was called “Citizen Kayne” and so I’m dubbing this blog “Citizen Kayne Strikes Again.” Back when I wrote that column, social media had yet to make its debut in the world (yes, it was that long ago!), so I’m curious as to how that will impact the work. I encourage you to respond to my social media posts or email me about topics you’d like me to cover, questions you’d like answered, and writing secrets you’d like revealed. And I’ll do my best to cover/answer/reveal them. I’ll shoot for posting about once a week and try to keep my blogs to a svelte 500 words. Most of all, I’ll try really hard to be entertaining.

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