Ksenia Anske's Blog

All illustrations by Edward Gorey. Who better to illustrate this than him?

Looking to hack the life out of your blog? I got your back.

This is how I went from 2,281 monthly visitors to 558 monthly visitors in 12 months. (Crying yet? You will soon.)

It’s time to drink vodka.

But before we dive into this priceless tutorial, first a definition of “killing.”

Killing your blog sounds easy. Just stop blogging!

Wrong.

To kill your blog you must destroy it so completely that it can’t be resurrected. Moreover, your re...class="">

Illustration by Jenny Richardson

What is it that you feel a lot of, every day?

For me it’s fear. I grew up with fear, fearing to be hurt, to be punished, to be abandoned. That was the fear of physical and mental pain. My other fear was that of starvation (hence my experiment with six days of no eating). I was afraid there wouldn’t be enough food. Some days there wasn’t enough, and I learned the terrible, sharp pangs of starvation (I wasn’t quite one year old when I had to have a blood transfusion in a...

Illustration by Jenny Richardson

What is it that you feel a lot of, every day?

For me it’s fear. I grew up with fear, fearing to be hurt, to be punished, to be abandoned. That was the fear of physical and mental pain. My other fear was that of starvation (hence my experiment with six days of no eating). I was afraid there wouldn’t be enough food. Some days there wasn’t enough, and I learned the terrible, sharp pangs of starvation (I wasn’t quite one year old when I had to have a blood trans...

Illustration by Salomé Gautier

Incredibly, this phrase popped into my head on the very first day of my vacation in Venice, Italy. A dream trip. My first real vacation in a little over eight years, since I started writing. And wrote I did, as you know. Every day. For four to six hours, sometimes more. Never taking a weekend off. A holiday. Nothing. I wrote like I was possessed, and I was possessed. Writing was my salvation.

Until this year my body told me to stop. It wasn’t having any of thi...

Illustration by Sai

It proved to be too much for my body—ten days. Ten days without food, drinking only water (no electrolytes, no broth, no NOTHING). Five days would’ve been perfect, and six days was a bit too much, so I had to stop. I started feeling very weak as my body has virtually no more fat to lose, after years of ketosis, and I was losing 1-2 pounds a day, so after six days I’ve lost seven pounds and got down to 107 pounds or 48.5 kilograms, the weight I haven’t been since I was s...

Illustration by Geoff McFetridge

I’m writing this on a chocolate high. I didn’t actually know chocolate high was possible. Tomorrow I’m starting a 10-day water fast. Meaning, I’ll be eating NOTHING and drinking only water for 10 days straight. So for three days prior to this I’ve been slamming my body with high-calorie foods, binging on chocolate and chocolate ice cream until it started falling out of my ears (almost). Also, fried chicken, lots of veggies sautéed in olive oil. Nuts. Seeds....

Illustration by Maggie Cole

Today it’s 7 years since I started writing full-time. In the past, every year, I wrote a blog post with 10 or 20 or more things I’ve learned over the years. Here they are:

2013: 10 Things I Learned from Being Self-Published for 1 Year
2014: What I Learned from Writing Full-time for 2 Years
2015: 20 Things I Learned from Writing Full-time for 3 Years
2016: 20 Self-Publishing Do’s and Don’t’s
2017: 25 Things I Learned from Writing Full-time for 5 Years
2018: 6 Things I...

I talked about this in class on Patreon, and I also posted it there, for patrons, but this example today is illustrating it even better.

Crosstalk ideally is what all of your dialogue should be, with the true meaning hidden underneath the spoken words. See how two people talk about two unrelated things, yet they become related in our mind?

In the picture above is the extreme example of crosstalk in dialogue.

I'd recommend reading the book it's from, Three Seconds, then watch the movie The Info...

Illustration by Serge Bloch

It’s 2019, and as you’ve noticed, I stopped blogging daily. Mostly because this year I’m focusing on teaching you how to write a book in 3 months on Patreon (more about it here). 

Thank you for your trust and your continuous subscription to my blog, about 500 of you who are staying with me no matter what I do (blog daily, don’t blog, blog about writing, about personal things, about crazy dark things that maybe shouldn’t be blogged about).

A simple question for you...

Some days I feel down and think, “This is taking forever, this whole getting-better-at-writing thing. And I’m still not quite making a living at it. How much more? How much longer? I’m so tired of working my ass off. What am I doing wrong? What can I do better?” And so on. You know the drill.

On days like these I find it most inspiring to read a biography of a writer who made it. Or watch a movie about them. 

Most recently it was Bohemian Rhapsody for me. And although it wasn’t a biography of...