Three years on... where are things at?
Hi all,
well the time has passed and if anyone has been following the website (
http://www.anovelmillion.com/) you will notice a large lack of activity (as well as here with the blog). So what happened, where am I, what is the future?
OK, so the website and progression of stories did not roar ahead as hoped three years ago and my own personal obligations needed to become a focus. Basically, the website started off with a bang and a lot of press interest. This was also seen in the website stats- a lot of people were interested in my website but unfortunately there were not too many people actually purchasing words. Since the website was based on an evolving story, the lack of new input to the stories was not a good thing. The website was needing a lot of my time (and i mean a lot). At the same time as the website, I was a few years into my PhD and needing to conduct some seriously long experiments. Under these circumstances one thing needed to happen, so I stopped focusing on the website and more on my PhD. Obviously people were still looking at the website, but since I wasn't receiving requests to contribute to the stories/buy words it was easy to switch my time to the PhD.
The PhD got serious. I talked at a number of conferences around the world, have published papers and am now officially a Doctor (of philosophy). During all these times, I was checking the website emails but not actually promoting the website since it requires a lot of time and (believe it or not) money. In fact, all of the money that I made (plus some) went on advertising in the beginning. Anyway, the website remained online in the background just in case I had time to give it another go in the future.
Where am I now? Well I finished my PhD and became a Doctor last year. I then celebrated with a few holidays- Sth America and India. I finished up in New Zealand January 2010 and I am now doing a post-doc in France. France is great- I love it here. I live in a chateau (now converted into apartments) on the beach and am loving the change in culture, language, environment. I'm not sure what the future will be with my personal life, but things are going well at the moment.
And what about the website? It's still online and welcomes submissions. I definitely lost the energy to continue my blog and promote the website with everything else that was happening in my life. I also learned from the period when the website began that it takes a lot of energy to run the type of website that I have. I am not going to be so active in the future unless it takes off, but I have decided to put a bit of my energy back into it.
So it's back online and open for submissions. But the websites success, and the amount of energy that I actually devote to the website is really based on the input from others. Let's hope that people will read this blog, realise that I haven't disappeared off the face of the earth, and will contact me with their interest and contributions- this is where the real fate of the website lies.
au revoir pour maintenant! (bye for now)
Oh yeah, to check out my website and what I am talking about, here is the link
http://www.anovelmillion.com/