There’s a version of the “why writers should blog” story that is tawdry and mercenary: “Blog,” the story goes, “and you will build a brand and a platform that you can use to promote your work.”

Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.

Thank you, Cory Doctorow, for summarizing why I hate blogging so much. The pressure to “build a platform” is enormous in the writing world; gotta be posting on X/Bsky/Threads, dancing for the TikToks, importing those TikToks as Reels on Instagram, and dumping all of your worldly writing knowledge into a blog on your website. Dance, monkey, and you too will see success.

What they don’t mention is that you might do all that and still not see success. You’ll shout into the void, and the void will not answer back. The futility is disheartening.

Blogging to create the perfect SEO that will bring readers to my website (and therefore buy my as-yet nonexistent books) always bothered me. I don’t feel like any sort of writing expert, and while you can argue that I’m an expert in my stories, I’m not entirely confident in that either. There’s loads I don’t know about my stories; if I did know it, I wouldn’t be as interested in exploring them. I may have learned how to outline, but I’m a pantser at heart: the journey is in the discovery.

So, why are we here? What is this website for, if not blogging? Well, I do intend to blog, just not in an SEO-friendly way. Like Doctorow describes in the above-quoted article on The Memex Method, this blog is more Commonplace Book than polished content. It’s a place for me to dump my online brain and give you glimpses into the stories circulating in my brain.

Doctorow continues:

This is the final inversion of blogging: not just publishing before selecting, nor researching before knowing your subject — but producing to attract, rather than serve, an audience.

Maybe, just maybe, if you like what I post here you’ll be more likely to buy a book in the future.

Until then, I’ll chose how and when to shout into the void, thankyouverymuch.