blog content – Miriam Drori, Author

Reading by the beach in Tel Aviv. You can’t see me reading because the book and the camera are on the same device.

I know, you haven’t seen me here for over a year, apart from a few book reviews and notices about my latest book (Re-Connections: thirty-seven stories of connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting).

What Happened?

I’d been writing blog posts since March 23, 2009 – almost seventeen years. I used to have quite a few active followers. Over the years, I noticed my following dwindling until most posts gathered no comments and only a few likes.

Why was that? I think people were overwhelmed by content; I know I have been. Also, my content has changed. There is just so much new stuff to say about social anxiety. And anyway, just as I don’t want social anxiety to control my life, I don’t want it to control my output. There is more to me than that.

I saw that many people began to write posts on Substack and decided to jump on the bandwagon, starting on January 1, 2024. But I didn’t get many followers there either, and that’s probably because I didn’t promote myself enough. Besides, why should I spread myself thin?

So now I’m back to posting on my website with renewed vigour and fresh ideas. Also, thanks to world leaders and our Home Front Command, all my outside activities have been paused, giving me more time to write.

What Fresh Ideas?

Last month, I attended a writing retreat in the Trudos Mountains of Cyprus, led by a fabulous duo: Jennifer Lang and Sherri Mandell. I learned a lot about writing memoir and hope to produce one of my own. The first topic I want to research for that is: how to write about fathers. In my next post, I plan to bring you what I’ve learned on that topic. I hope some of you will have things to add.

See you again, soon.

Writers’ Blogs

I write.
My friends write.
They get published.
That’s wonderful.

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs by writers lately. It seems every writer has a blog. That’s not surprising. Writers want to publicise themselves and their work, and writers can write. So, it seems natural that they should blog.

What do they blog about? About writing and publishing, about authors and publishers, about writing competitions and other news in the writing world. And, of course, about themselves, what they’ve written and what they’ve had published.

They write well, of course, because they’re writers. Sometimes, they’re even humorous. And yet, I’m starting to get bored with these blogs, because of the one thing they leave out: personal struggles. Yes, I know, they write about their pets, their children, the places they live in. But they don’t write anything really personal. We readers can’t tell much about their characters. We don’t know about the hurdles they’ve overcome, or the way their personal lives influenced their writing.

And I wonder how honest they are. They treat their writer friends very well, praising them for their skill and their good fortune when they win competitions or have their books accepted by publishers. But do they really mean that? Aren’t they just a tiny bit jealous of other writers’ triumphs? According to Ann Lamont in her wonderfully humorous and informative guide Bird by Bird, they certainly could be:

Jealousy is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confidence you’ve been able to muster. But if you continue to write, you are probably going to have to deal with it, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know – people who are, in other words, not you.

Not that I’m jealous. I haven’t got that far, yet. And I’m not criticising anyone else. I’m just wondering how all of this relates to me. This is what I’ve decided:

Writing involves innovating, pushing boundaries, being courageous. And I’m going to continue writing what I write, because, amongst other reasons, I don’t want to turn this into just another writer’s blog.