Recently I’ve been looking at comment threads on old posts. Five years ago, people were leaving a lot more comments. But commenting on blogs has faded along with the popularity of blogging, which a lot of people see as soooo last decade. These days, a lot of authors prefer Substack, which is new and shiny.
For now, I’m hanging onto this blog, although it does have a lot of problems, including a weird number of “brute force attacks”— where hackers use bots to try 1000s of passwords a minute to try to break in. Generally the server has to take the blog offline to protect it.
Why these hackers want to break into a non-monetized author blog is beyond me, but then I don’t know why I still get dozens of requests every week from people who want to regale our audience of writers with articles about buying real estate in Dubai, making cat food in an air fryer, or what to wear to a Taylor Swift concert.
But as I perused the old comments, I saw that a lot of them were spectacularly clueless. Often 30% of them showed the commenter hadn’t read a word of the post. So commenting in the old days didn’t actually mean a lot more people were reading the blog.
On a post offering tips for writing your first chapter, I got a whole string of comments saying I was stifling creativity by making up rules and forcing authors obsess about their first chapters.
My first tip? “#1 Don’t obsess about your first chapter.”
Yup.
So I’m going to repeat it now, for visitors who still read the actual blogposts.
Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog 
I couldn’t seem to comment on Anne’s blog so I’ll comment here and hope she reads it.
YES!
Y E S !
Y E S ! !
I’ve been writing fiction for over twenty years now so I can’t remember where I first came across the idea of the first draft being for the writer, but it’s stuck with me ever since. Thank you, Anne, for putting this fundamental bit of advice out there. It is true and every writer needs to know it. Cheers!
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