What's left to say?

The wonderful thing about being a professional novelologist of some very modest renown is that I have a public voice.  Not only do I have a public voice, but I get paid to have it.  That always strikes me as strange considering how so many struggle to be heard, yet I am heard AND I get paid to be heard.  The information age has given most of us the chance to reach out to our fellow Terrans and share our thoughts, dreams, and witty asides.  The downside is that, with so many voices added to the collective discussion, it's hard to pick any one out.

This is why self-publishing and e-publishing are not the Holy Grail they're often presented to be.  It's true that almost anyone can get a book published at this point.  The word Publish does mean "to make public".  And anyone with enough determination can write a book and throw it out into the public sphere.  Yet in an endless ocean of books, both traditionally and self-published, it's hard to get noticed.  Almost impossible.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is either delusional or lying.

My 8th book is coming out next month.  I remain an obscure writer most people have never heard of.  I will most likely remain an obscure writer.  If  I publish thirty or forty novels, this will still be true.  If one of the film options takes off then I'll probably get a boost, but aside from that, I'll most probably never be a household name.  It's a question of scale.  If I manage to sell 300,000 copies of a book one day, it's still the tiniest sliver of the Terran population.

But I'm drifting from my original point.

What's left to say?  If you're lucky enough to have a voice that will be heard, if even only by a few loyal fans, then what do you do with that voice?  Inevitably, won't you run out of interesting things to say?  Can a person broadcast his thoughts on a semi-regular basis to strangers on the internet without endlessly repeating himself?  Or is there a point where it's just more of the same?

I like to think of myself as a semi-interesting guy with some unique thoughts to be added to the collective consciousness.  But I've been blogging for a few years now, and often, as I sit down to write one of these posts, I find myself wondering if I'm just not stuck in some endless loop.

Ghost hunters?  Silly pseudo-science.  CHECK

Giant fightin' robots?  Awesome.  CHECK

Games?  Cool.  CHECK

Writing?  Not as hard as you think.  CHECK

And so on . . .

If you think about it, so much of our conversation is just repeats of conversations we've already had.  It's just old conversations with new people.  And that's fine in real life.  But on the internet, I sometimes wonder what's the point here?  If someone really cares what I have to say about something, they can just peruse the older posts.  True, those posts were written by the past me, who is different from the present me, who is probably different than the future me.  But some constants seem to remain the same.  Past me loves giant fightin' robots and Tarzan.  Future me probably will too.

Well, I guess I've wasted enough of your time talking about how I have nothing new to talk about.  If you stuck around, thanks for reading.  And if you want to leave a comment on something you'd like me to talk about, even if it's something I've talked about before, then feel free to do so.  I accept that I'll have to repeat myself as time goes on.  But at least I'd like it to be about something someone, somewhere, is interested in reading.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee