I don't post here nearly enough, and maybe that's why I don't have a following here. Yeah, that's it, I'm going with that! Never mind all the naysayers who just say I'm dull and uninteresting... So, this study of where I am and where I'm going went up on my WordPress blog (https://talestoldindarkness.wordpress...) on the 19th of August. Read and, with any luck at all, enjoy!

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So here I sit staring at a screen and wondering how the hell I got here. As most of you know, my focus is as a writer. This is a fairly new blog for me, and the title (Tales Told in Darkness) is based on the fact that it was going to be a repository for my more obscure works, mainly horror, that mostly appeared on writing-dot-com and were orphaned from the web when I left.

I initially cut-and-pasted them to the left sidebar for everyone to enjoy for free at their leisure. If you’d care to go back and read my original post, you’ll find me saying that this blog was about the stories, and I didn’t plan to post much here. That’s the way it went in the early going. I could have posted the stories in a single day. They were already on Office, so it was a matter of a few mouse clicks, and voila, story transferred. But I parceled them out in order to have ongoing content for a while, and here’s what happened: I’d post a story as a page, then go to Facebook and announce that I’d posted something. A few people, usually two or three, would show up to look ⁠— the stat sheet doesn’t tell me at what ⁠— and then everything would die until I posted the next one.

I then started blogging about odds and ends here, and the same thing happened. I’d put up a post, tout it on Facebook, a few people would come for a look, and then, crickets. So, I’ve been leaning toward the thought that, if people only show up when I announce something on Facebook, why not cut this loose and just post directly on Facebook?

This idea was amplified by “Booksie’s short story contest.” Booksie is a writers’ site similar to WattPad, and they announced ⁠— on Facebook, no less ⁠— a short story contest with prizes up to $500. So I transcribed what I think is my best story, The Indian, and submitted it for consideration. It got a lot of reads and even some nice comments right away, so I moved the other stories over there. Why not, at least people are looking at them.

And then, largely due to the incessant jabbering of one William J. Jackson, I looked into Vella. Post your work, the first three scenes are free, and you pay in tokens to read further. Tokens are a penny apiece and buy you 100 words of reading per. Vella even gives you 200 tokens to get you started. When I left writing-dot-com I had a series of novellas in the works about an occult detective agency, and I thought, this is what I’ll try Vella with.

Holy smokes! The first month it brought in pennies short of $85. It’s crass to reveal that, I know, but I’m trying to make a point here. The biggest single royalty check I ever received before that was $29.00, and most months, royalties run between $1 and $3. I’m not doing this for money (a damned good thing!), but money on Vella means that someone, several someones, have read the free material and found it of sufficient quality to pay to read more. I have since set up an anthology to hold my other stories and have begun a novel. I don’t think it’s any surprising revelation to say that eventually all of my work is likely to end up there. Note that Vella requires exclusive content, so everything that goes up there will of necessity disappear from everywhere else.

So, what about this site? I haven’t posted anything here for two weeks, and no one has sent the web police around to see whether I’m still alive. I had pretty much decided to close it, but when I logged in this morning, I found a new follower, someone whose work I follow closely, and I decided that if he finds me interesting enough to follow, then I’d better provide some content for him to get his teeth into. Accordingly, I will be putting material up here on at least a weekly basis.

And who is this guy who saved the blog? I have no idea, but that’s by design. He goes by the handle Firewater65, and blogs frequently and in great detail about matters of popular culture from classic rock to the TV shows that have acquired cult followings. If you have any interest in pop-culture, and like witty, incisive writing that goes into great detail on subjects from The Beatles to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you NEED to follow his blog. It’s an E-ticket ride through the sixties on up. Here’s your boarding pass:

https://firewatersite.wordpress.com/

See you there!

~ Jack