The State of the Blog

Greetings all,
I’ve been shifting my writing platform focus a little lately, so it seemed like a good time for more of a personal update.  (Don’t worry, I’m not completely redoing the blog.)

A Brief History of Writing for Life
Although I have some clearly defined interests, I have a hard time picking one to stick with for a while when it comes to writing, so when I launched Writing for Life it was tag-lined “Teen writers living life while making it better.”  The idea was that I could write about writing, Atheism / ideological thoughts, and random life stuff and make it all fit together in a logical manner.

Then I learned more about marketing and audience and such, and realized that that was too broad – aside from the teen writers part, it was too hard to actually tell who would and wouldn’t benefit from reading my posts.  I needed to narrow down who my target reader was.  So, I cut it down to Atheist writers more specifically.  (The tagline as I’m writing this is still “For teen Atheist writers, by one,” although I’ll probably have updated it by the time the email for this goes out.)

The Current State of Mia’s Writing Affairs
Then over the summer, I realized I’m asexual and probably aromantic.  (Incidentally, National Coming Out Day is the 11th of this month.)  As writing and being ace has come up in various conversations, I’ve noticed that people get excited about having more ace characters in fiction.  Given that probably half or more of my own characters over time have been ace without my even realizing it, and that out of what I’m interested in writing, it serves the biggest social need, I’ve decided to build my author brand around providing ace/aro spectrum representation in fiction.

That gives me a specific focus when it comes to my actual fiction content and my social media (currently just Twitter for the most part, although I have a writing Instagram I could revive any time). As you’ve probably noticed, my email list is fairly quiet outside of blog post updates, except for the occasional resource like a free conference that I think you might like.  I’m waiting until I have more content that’s of value before I start sending more.

I’m not 100% sure what I’m doing with this blog.  I have no plans to discontinue it, as I sometimes have stuff to say and like having a nonfiction outlet, but I’m also not entirely sure how it fits into the grand scheme.  I like to write about writing, so I don’t see myself changing that aspect of it.  I also like writing the occasional Atheism article, and I feel like I’m going to start writing nonfiction about ace/aro stuff at some point.  It’s part of my platform somehow – I just haven’t clearly defined what my goal for it is, so I’m just kind of posting stuff and maintaining the status quo right now.  I might make Writing for Life slightly more detached from my email list – right now they come as a package deal, with no way to opt-in to only one or the other – and keep it as more of an “organized collection of general thoughts on life” for a bit, and/or I might bring it more explicitly in line with my focus on ace/aro representation.  Haven’t chosen a course of action yet.

Anyway, that’s what’s happening behind-the-scenes around here.
What’s going on in your writing life?