Dear reader…

Of possible ends and possible beginnings, and a small reflection on the nature of writing.

I’m leaving.

Okay, that might have been too brutal. Let’s try again.

I opened this space a few years ago (three years, to be exact) for three main reason.

I needed a home for my story and poetry ideas that were bouncing around my head.

I needed a gym of sorts to train my writing muscles.

I needed to build confidence in placing my writing in front of an audience.

Oddball Tales has been a great outlet for all of the above.

Yes, I know, it is all very self-centred, which you are not supposed to be when speaking to an audience. I’m meant to make this all about you, dear reader.

Well, I’m a writer, not a marketer, and believe that writing for an audience is, at its core, a self-centred enterprise that requires no small amount of hubris.

After all, we are acting on the assumption that someone out there is interested in the content of our heads at least as much as we are.

From a different angle, writing for an audience is a desperate bid for connection, a plea to find our own people, the people who will relate to that head content and enjoy it at least as much as it takes to read a piece in its entirety.

(Although obviously we can’t forget that writers need to eat and pay bills just like everyone else, and human validation is yet to be accepted as a currency, so support your authors, reader. Leave reviews, recommend them around, spread the love; independent authors especially need that support.)

But I digress.

I created this space for reasons that were entirely my own and had to do with practice, connection, confidence. Not because I felt like my ideas were a gift to humankind. I appreciated each and every feedback, comment, and interaction the space has brought me; none of it was a given.

Oddball Tales has given me great satisfaction, frustration, fun, underwhelm, joy, a mixed bag of emotions that ultimately amount to a net positive in my book.

And it might be time for me to move on from it.

My craft still needs work (writers are lifelong learners) and I still need that audience practice. My head is still a flipper full of ideas bouncing around.

However, Oddball Tales has become sort of like a baby that needs constant feeding and I am struggling to balance the planning of these issues with other writing project at this time.

Some of the issues seem to amount to me taking on too many endeavours at once, but there is also a sense of overgrowth that I don’t want to ignore much longer.

I am taking a break to figure out the next step.

Perhaps this space will move elsewhere, in a different form.

Perhaps my writing itself will take completely different routes of publication.

I need to think without a monthly deadline, and I didn’t want this to be another newsletter that peters out and disappears without a trace or a warning.

I’ll definitely come back once I have decided on the next steps.

Thank you, dear reader, truly, for being with me and my Oddball Tales so far.

Happy reading and bye for now!