Empty Quarter

Oh, dear. Three months have passed and no post at all.

Is the Fake Plastic blog dead?

As Hemlock pointed out the other day, most of the other old UAE blogs have died. Do all blogs die one day? I suppose so - people get bored, move on, grow up, whatever. You realise that the volume of effort that goes into posting is increasingly indefensible. And that your 'hot take' on the world may well amuse you, but it's hardly worth sharing every day. As the lovely young things of Instagram are only just finding - and we found years ago - that whole sharing everything starts to become an end in itself and it doesn't really make much sense in real life.

The Fat Expat Blog was a lot of fun, for instance, but it just took too much out of us. Other UAE foodie blogs rose up from more talented people with more time on their hands.

And, increasingly, I've found I don't need to vent on here so much. I don't really need an audience (I never thought I needed one, but in reality I liked having one. A bit like Geekfest, that one - if it becomes important to you, it's probably time to stop doing it). It's not that there aren't things to vent about - my last visa renewal was a little shop of horrors, but then we all have horrible visa renewals, no?

I've got a new book in the offing, so it'd be nice to do that whole sort of 'It's important to keep the blog going as an author promotion platform' thing but then that makes you, the reader, the tool for my ambition (I'm using you, in other words, to promote my book) and it also doesn't work very well (a few, a very, very few people have read my books because they've liked my blog. It's likely in the tens, though. This is not a book promotion panacea, you understand. I'm not Boris Akunin, for instance, whose blog can pull six or ten thousand comments per post!).

I could blog about my book writing, publishing and production experience of course, but then a) it's not very interesting and b) see using people point above. I have issues laying out my content stall because I want to make people behave in a certain way ('Buy my book'). Yes, yes, I know I never had issues with that before, but I'm a different person now. Honest. No, really. I swear.

Also, please note, book posts have always been a HUGE downer on the blog. I post about whales having belly buttons or the awful shite that Tim Horton's put in their 'coffee' and you're looking at multiple thousands, even tens of thousands, of page views. Book post? A thousand or so if you're lucky and a LOT of tumbleweed knocking around.

As eny fule no, a thousand views put into the formula proposed by McNabb's Law of Clicks means a picobook is sold. It's hardly worth it, really, is it?

Anyway, I may well post again if and when the fancy takes me - but I'm clearly no longer in the 'post a day' league, as we can all see.

Meanwhile, you can always find me, of course, on Twitter!