In the middle of chit-chat last week, a client encouraged me to write a novel. I am flattered, but refuse. Before that, another potential client offered me $150 to ghost write a 20-page romance novel. Just the same, I refused. Anything more than 10 pages fries my neurons to the core.
“Don’t think you can’t,” he said. “Write for yourself, not for other people.” That may seem a commonplace advice, but the timing was impeccable.
And I am tired of that kind of thinking, of seeking validation in numbers, no matter how sporadically done.
I had to go back to that place nearly a decade ago and re-assess why I blog in the first place.
Way back in Friendster and Myspace era, I simply wrote. Sometimes incoherently, drunken on alcohol and teenage sorrow. It didn’t matter if anybody cared to look. I wrote and that’s all there is to it. I was happy.
Suddenly, we were bombarded with industry standards; with metric measurements that quadrupled faster than we can catch up. Of people making hundreds of thousands from ad boxes and bloggers gloating of 50,000 page views a day. And that’s when, rather ambitiously, I started caring about the figures, sometimes more than the reason why I actually set up the blog in the first place.
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A butterfly (technically, this moth) didn’t achieve its beauty without difficulties. But when it did, it’s awesome! |
(I do get invites for events and to sample dishes in restaurants, but even then, I select wisely. I don’t just jump on every offer, because that’s not my primary goal.)
I write because I need to. There’s that nagging need for me to write when I don’t, and I need a place for those thoughts so they don’t start taking over my day job. Before Filipina Explorer was born, I brought a journal and a pen with me wherever I went. That was a comfort blankie I kept since fifth grade. But now I have this.
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