Canary In A Coal Mine

Writing is a many faceted endeavor - more so than I ever anticipated when over a decade ago I told myself it was time to take that lifetime dream, those little scraps of muse driven first lines and half written novels, and get serious.  Then, I thought it was all about the writing.  Silly me.

I never factored in the octopus that is the writing industry.  It's not a natural octopus either for its arms  are not a stable eight but an unstable labyrinth of mutating possibilities.  Promotion alone could make an author lose sleep at night and that's not thinking about it but actually doing it - being online, addressing one more possibility, one more potential reader connection.   And that's where the octopus starts to mutate.

While promotion could choke you if you let it - in the end I know it is all about the writing.   But there is the fact that you have to get the writing under the nose or preferably noses of people willing to read it. 

It's a full-time job some days juggling all those balls.  For those who have made it - there's assistants.  For the rest of us, there's those wonderful people who volunteer and just quietly step in and fill a role.  When it comes to my blog I count on one person.  She's my self-appointed canary.  And she was singing pretty loudly the other day when she e-mailed me not once but three times and that's before I had even responded to the first e-mail with the news that my blog was not opening properly in her browser.  Not news I wanted to hear on that day but definitely news I needed to hear, and quickly.

Like a canary in a coal mine, sometimes we just need a friendly voice rerouting before we hit a derailment.  

Ryshia
www.ryshiakennie.com