Going Underground

Unfortunately, my posting has been a bit erratic over the past week or so, for a variety of reasons. Getting a new story for The Sleaze written and posted was one, the fact that I'm, quite frankly, tiring of the pace of my regular posting ans beginning to resent the amount of time it takes, is another. The ongoing traffic situation at The Sleaze hasn't helped either. For a while things seemed to be on an upward trend. Sadly, as ever, this turned out to be another false dawn and traffic subsequently plumbed new depths or several days. Trying to deal with this situation has also taken an inordinate amount of time. The long and the short of it is that I've come to some pretty momentous decisions regarding both The Sleaze and this blog. With regard to the former, the next three stories are pretty much sketched out and should appear on schedule. After that, I'm abandoning the existing schedule of three stories a month and instead simply writing and posting stuff on an ad hoc basis, as and when I have the inspiration, ideas and inclination to write it. Consequently, from April, sometimes there might only be one story a month, other months there could be four or five, depending upon my circumstances. I also intend easing up on my rate of posting here. I've been averaging four posts a week for quite a while now and, to be honest, I just don't have sufficient inspiration to keep this up!

I'm afraid I've become more than a little disillusioned with the net of late. Back when I started The Sleaze, the web seemed the perfect platform for outsiders like me to find an audience for their material. As time as gone on, a combination of more professional publishers muscling in on the action and changes in the way search engine s produce their results, have meant that, to an extent, the old order has been restored, with us amateurs squeezed out. It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain any reasonable level of traffic to a site like The Sleaze when, as I am, one is largely dependent upon organic traffic generated by search engines. In practice this means that the site is very much at the mercy of Google's algorithms. Changes in the way Google produces its search results can have major consequences for small sites like mine - an increased targeting of 'local' sites in Google's regional versions has deprived me of a lot of traffic from Asia, for instance. However, over the past couple of weeks I've found that it can be shockingly simple to manipulate traffic levels if I can be arsed to put the effort in (today, for instance, levels are back up). Most of the time, I can't! That said, I have secured an alternative source of traffic which, by and large, avoids this regional bias, and, over the next couple of months, I'll be taking action which should maximize The Sleaze's potential there. I'm sorry to sound so vague and cagey about this new source, but I really don't wan't to tempt fate by discussing it in too great a detail.

The question is - what am I going to do with all the free time these changes to my writing schedule will create? Well, apart from that old perennial of completing that model railway I'm always saying I'm going to finish one day, there's a growing stack of DVDs I haven't been able to get around to watching, not to mention a backlog of stuff I've recorded on my DVR and not yet watched. I've also recently reawakened an interest in old hobby - board wargames. I've recently dusted off some of my old games with a view to playing them again. Right now I'm grappling with the rule book for 'Carrier', a solitaire game of WWII naval action in the Pacific. I've owned that game for over twenty years and I've never yet actually played it, the bloody rules are so complex! But this time I'm determined to master them! I'm also bidding on a couple of second hand games on ebay. Whilst I have no intention of this becoming a wargaming blog, I'll keep you updated on developments.

So there you have it, I'm not abandoning The Sleaze or Sleaze Diary, just scaling down my commitments. If nothing else, this will give me time to consider the direction I want to take them in. The other day I found myself worrying that a planned story might be considered insensitive and tasteless. This made me realise how far I've allowed The Sleaze to drift from its origins - it was always meant to be an 'underground' site, flying in the face of convention and tackling subjects no other humour or satire publication would touch. I didn't care about traffic, just so long as somebody read it and was shocked and/or offended! A long period of high traffic levels turned my head and I've spent too long writing the stories I thought would get the hits. I think it is time I went back underground and aimed to shock again!