Free Stories Blog Gets Some Attention

Today I was feeling blue because of a work-related accident ( deleted an article I shouldn't have, and I couldn't get it back because I created it today and had't backed it up on the network yet). Anyway, my creative juices sort of tanked, and I couldn't concentrate much on writing.

Just to feel productive, I started going through my blogs to see if there were minor updates I could do that didn't actually require much creativity. That's when I realised the space where I post some of my children's stories, was horribly neglected.

Interestingly, the blog has a high Google ranking ( it's on page one when you search for African children's stories). I guess that means all this promotion work I have been doing for the past year is bearing fruit.

But it's no use inviting the whole world to that space, and giving them directions to get there, if I don't regularly put up new stories. Why should readers come back to the same old thing over and over again?

Ironically, that's the most important of my blogs, because that's where I actually write creatively, rather than talking about it.

I think that's why the space intimidates me. It's easy enough to talk about the creative writing process, and share some life adventures and lessons learnt from them. But African Tales is where the fruit of that labour lies; where readers get to sample my stories and decide whether the work I talk about is really all it's cracked to be. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is very scary.

But enough faffing around. Over the holiday season and the beginning of 2008, I will polish some of the stories growing mould in my laptop, and put them up on that blog for people to enjoy. I can only reach my intended objectives for blogging if I write more, publish more, and have more readers exploring the worlds I create.

That's not a new year resolution, BTW. Swore against making them years ago, as I've never been able to keep most of them.

Anyway, I want to thank Martin Auer, of The Happy Hour Storybook for linking his blog with my stories.

Martin, your comment on one of the stories was a wake-up call, because I couldn't even work out when it was left there or how many readers from your blog have been visiting mine.

I also want to thank all the people who've been quietly visiting the space. Much appreciated and please leave a message, just to say whether the story worked for you or not. It helps quite a bit with the creative process.