Four years have passed since I started writing short stories on this blog. My routine for the first two or so years was posting two short stories, then an article. This routine went on for years, with me posting every single Friday.
In the last year or so, I posted articles more frequently and only one or two short stories every month. I know that most visitors to the blog visit it to read stories, and that’s exactly what I should give them. There were several reasons that I stopped posting short stories regularly.
The first reason is that I have less time. I’m running a business and I’m also focused on promoting my personal finance book From Homeless to Debtless with Savings. That’s taken up a significant amount of time. It takes a lot of time for me to plan a story. I have to come up with a plot, which can take an hour or two, and then writing the story takes four to six hours.
Keep in mind that I publish these stories for free. I also convert some of them into audio so that you can listen to them. That’s another cost I incur.
Hosting this site is a significant yearly cost. Most readers don’t care about that. They just want free stuff. And I can understand that. But if you want me to keep churning out stories, then the best way is to support me by buying my debut novel, My Wife and Girlfriend.
I have more than 200 posts on this blog. There are more than 100 short stories, which you can read for free. After writing so many short stories, I ran out of ideas. Sure, I kept writing short stories, but I often felt that they were subpar. The reasons I published them is to uphold my ritual of publishing every Friday and to offer readers a post that wasn’t an article.
I’m sure you can understand that every author has a dry spell, where he or she doesn’t have great ideas. I don’t call it writer’s block because that’s a synonym for writers being lazy. They don’t even want to try to come up with ideas. I tried and felt that I failed with the last several stories I published. They weren’t bed, but they were far from my best.
Most of the stories I published when I started this blog had a twist. Some of the twists were really good, which is difficult to concoct. Eventually, I stopped incorporating twists into my stories because I couldn’t think of a good one. I was disappointed in myself for that but also proud of myself for continuing to write.
Maybe I’m wrong about the latest stories being subpar. For all I know, readers enjoy them more than the first ones that I published. But I just don’t see the spark in them. Again, I’m glad I have something down on paper. It’s better than a blank sheet. But the latest short stories are not my best. I want to write amazing stories, and I just don’t have the time or imagination to come up with great stories.
Also, I’m writing a romance suspense novel. I’ve been writing one thousand words every day for the last few months. I’ve written more than eighty thousand words of the book, and I still have a long way to go. This is actually the biggest reason why I’ve been posting fewer short stories on this blog.
The time has come for me to take a break from posting short stories on this blog. Not to worry. I’ll post them again after I’ve had time to come up with really great plots and twists. The next short story I post needs to be magical, so I’ll need time to come up with the premise.
Until then, I’ll post articles every Friday.
I’m still trying to figure out a way to monetise the short stories or generate an income from book sales. I’ve sold a few copies of My Wife and Girlfriend on the blog but not enough to bring out the second and third book in the series, which I’ve already written. The best part is that I think the second and third books are much better than the first. Keep in mind that the first book in the series was the first novel I had ever written.
So, let’s see how I feel in the coming weeks and months. Maybe something great happens and my imagination reignites to the point where I’m just pumping out short stories, one week after another. That could happen.
But until then, I’ll continue to write my romance suspense novel and post articles on my personal finance blog, as well as this one.
We’ll chat soon.
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