Dimly Lit Alley-Way

Hello, Nightwalkers. 🖤

It has been a while since my last article, and this one is to let my readers know about some of the changes that are afloat.

Firstly, the website itself has gone through a little redesign. Having had the last few months to reflect while taking time off with chronic illness, I realised that over time, my writing had changed and, in the same token, I also realised that somewhere along the way, I had lost sight of what Dimly Lit Alley was supposed to be.

The Alley has always been a home for my writing and creative work. That part hasn’t changed. What changed was me.

For a while, social media made me feel like I was supposed to be something I’m not: a content creator.

I’m not a content creator. I’m a writer.

I don’t work to a content schedule. Sometimes I’m incredibly prolific and other times, I disappear for a while. That’s just how I work.

Life, work and everything else affect how much creative energy I have available, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise just to keep an algorithm happy.

Eventually, I started noticing what happened when I stopped feeding the social media machine. The numbers changed. Reach changed. Engagement changed.

Apparently, that’s what happens when you stop constantly producing things for the machine.

I’m not a machine either.

But it wasn’t just social media that made me start questioning things. It was what was happening with the writing itself.

For a long time, being published was a dream and a goal. Something I wanted to work towards. Something I hoped would happen someday.

Then “Fractured Continuum” changed that.

Next month, my short story will be published in an anthology.

It’s a small sentence, but it represents a fairly big shift for me.

Publication stopped being some distant possibility.

It became real.

And once that happened, I started looking at everything else I was doing a little differently, because I realised I wasn’t simply someone who wanted to become a writer.

I was already doing the work.

In this time away, I’d finished my first novel and I’m now developmentally editing it. I’m fleshing out the parts that need more room, cutting the things that don’t work, and generally making a mess of the manuscript so I can put it back together properly and have something I can send to an editor.

Then there’s the other book.

That one I originally started as what was supposed to be a series of posts for the blog. It was never supposed to become a book, and that too is now going through its own developmental edit.

And just a hint for you lot… it does have something to do with AI and movies… and that’s all I’m saying for now.

That’s also why I’m making a small change to the way I describe what happens here.

The blogging isn’t stopping. I’m just retiring the word “blogging”.

I have had this site since 2013, and the writing has outgrown the label and the site. As cute as it was, it needed to grow up.

I didn’t want a separate author website or extra fuckery, as I already have a digital space, so the website redesign is really about bringing everything back into alignment. It doesn’t need to become something completely different. It needs to catch up with where I am now.

The writing and creative projects need to be more firmly at the forefront because that’s where my focus has moved.

The website is the home base. It always has been, and it’s where the longer-form work lives, where projects can develop, and where I can make something without having to reduce it to a post, a caption or whatever format a platform happens to prefer.

Social media is secondary to that.

Which is why I’m changing that side of things too.

I’m moving all new social posting over to Bluesky. 🦋

Instagram will remain as a legacy account, but I won’t be actively posting there anymore, and the Dimly Lit Alley Facebook page has been deactivated.

Part of that is because I’ve simply had enough of the Meta fuckery — the ads, algorithms, bots, fake accounts and endless spam.

But more importantly, I don’t want social media deciding what my creative work should look like or who actually sees it.

I want the work to do that, and I want genuine reach and engagement. You don’t have to doom scroll through ads and whatever the heck else to get to my content… or anyone else’s content, for that matter.

And I think digital autonomy is important. I certainly don’t want to spend my time chasing numbers or trying to convince an algorithm that I exist.

I want to write.

Sometimes I’ll write like a maniac.

Sometimes I’ll disappear.

And that’s okay.

So, where does that leave us?

Pretty much where we started.

The Alley is still here. The writing is still here.

The rabbit holes are still here.

What’s changed is that I have a much clearer idea of what I’m actually doing.

I’m not trying to become a content creator.

I’m not trying to keep a blog alive for the sake of having a blog, and I am certainly not chasing numbers.

As I always say, if I have 5 genuine readers, it’s better than 500 bots.

Until next time…

S.