Goodbye AdSense!

I have just cancelled my Google AdSense account.

There have been questions relating to the integrity of a writer who lets his blog be used by others to advertise products and services.

Lately the question of why I'm writing has had some answers. For example, I get very concerned about how many page views I have, it sometimes borders on obsession. I think this is unhealthy - one doesn't write to have everybody read one's work. One writes to reach somebody a lot of the time, yes, but an obsession over statistics and magnitude is not cool. I'd rather let go of the quantitative nightmares and focus on the qualitative dream. Keep writing, worry whether it's any good or not, hope it reaches 'the right people' (usually receptive and thoughtful folk), but forget about how many.

Getting rid of AdSense, which has earned me just over three pounds (which I can't claim because it's under the threshold of sixty), is a way of keeping the blog about what it should be (and probably never has been!
) - quality. Letting go of as many numbers as possible is a way of getting rid of as many distractions as I can.

We can only hope that the blog improves because of this...

Thanks to DS for the motivation.

Test

Technical Issues

I actually bought a dictaphone recently (with many a poetic aim in mind), but I don't seem to be able to find a way on Blogger to add sound files (well, general documents apart from pictures or videos to be honest).

Does anyone out there know a way I can upload my sounds to Blogger please?

Peace out

x

Getting On With It

I have so many ideas for this blog, and yet I'm publishing less and less. Soon my drafts will outweigh my published posts, and whereas there are some things you can keep to yourself, that's not the main point of Blogtastic. I've got an idea for a new series of posts and hopefully you will get something out of it. Once every month at least (i.e. payday) I have a splurge on books. What I fancy doing for this new series is posting a list of the books I've bought.

It sounds simple. It is simple. It's a kind of diary. They aren't recommendations yet, although I may review them in the future. In the absence of the regular reviews that used to feature here, these book lists still form a kind of dialogue. All things can be 'read between the lines', such as why one bought a particular pair together. Are they forming research for a project? Are any of them for uni or 'just for fun'? What happens if I lie on the list - add ones I haven't bought - how does that make it look? What does the list suggest, if anything, beyond the brute fact(s) of the books?

But it's not to be my job to answer, or even explicitly pose, these questions. I'm just going to put the list on here. It could be helpful for my development, another form of introspection, but as I said before, I hope you'll get something out of it too. I'm just not sure what. Possibly in the future there'll be more reviews or at least 'read lists', minor comments or whatever... We'll see.

Without further ado, here is the latest list:

• Monsters of Men (Chaos Walking Trilogy) - Patrick Ness
• Connoisseur's Science Fiction - Tom Boardman (ed.)
• Exercises in Style - Raymond Queneau
• Teach Yourself Writing Poetry - Matthew Sweeney