The Downside of Writing

Writing a daily column can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. Don't get me wrong - I love it, and would love for Ask Tazi! to go places financially, as well as socially (which is it currently doing) but sometimes I feel like I am not doing enough to promote it; and sometimes I feel like I am doing too much to promote it.

I love writing. Ever since I was a child, I have loved the creativity of it. I started reading Ann Landers when I was seven years old and read it every day until her final column. I owned the book she wrote until it got destroyed by water damage, and it was always a dream of mine to be an advice columnist myself - thus the purpose of continuing with Ask Tazi! The letters I get are real, but I sometimes wonder if I am choosing the right ones - those that an audience would find most interesting or most helpful or just most entertaining. I try to find a balance between offering serious help for widespread problems and letters that entertain others, in spite of the fact that they do reflect someone else's real-life issue - real enough that they felt the need to write to an advice columnist about it.

Having a degree in Communications helps me a lot in this career project (which is what it has become). I am able to read between the lines and tell if information is missing, or if someone is twisting the story. I can tell if a man is writing the letter pretending to be his wife or vice-versa (almost 80% of my letters are from women) and I can tell if a letter is real or fake. My degree specializations were Interpersonal Communications and Mass Communications, so I am happy to be using both to do something I love, but I still feel...afraid that it will all just end before I am ready to see it stop.

Ask Tazi! has its slow days. For some reason, traffic drags on Tuesdays. I have tried to increase it by printing what I think are the most interesting letters, but all that has done is result in less readership for some of my best topics. I have added a blog review feature, "Tazi Recommends..." for Sundays that seems to be going over well. I do not know if it attracting extra attention to the blogs reviewed, but it has certainly helped my numbers. And yet...

I know online pay-per-click advertising is a complete rip-off, but I do it anyway in the hope of getting something back for my efforts, in a financial sense. Thus the publication of Tails From Ask Tazi: Past Missives of Great Import (Vol. 1). I suppose I just lack patience...and that is the downside of writing. It is the downside of life, really: things move not at your pace, but the pace of the world around you. I'm just going to have to accept that fact...or spend my life aggravated.