I’m excited to be back!
Initially when I decided to take a hiatus from active posting here on the Written Vixen, it was intended to do some basic clean-up that I didn’t have the time to do effectively. Amidst trying to balance writing, updating the blog and my daily life, I found an opportunity to move cross country!
I’m super excited to be living somewhere that gets actual weather patterns and experience new things. Unfortunately getting ready to move was one thing I couldn’t balance alongside everything else. I knew I’d have to prioritize. My blog had to take a seat a little further in the back.
There’s a silver lining to that however. A lot of the work I’d planned on doing was really just basic maintenance. Cleaning up my links, getting set up to start some of the features I really want to get rolled out, things like that. Knowing I’d have to extend my absence, I took the opportunity to do a little more work.
For starters, I took a good look at all of the posts I’ve made here on the Written Vixen. All five hundred and ten of them—five hundred! I hadn’t realized exactly how many there were. With that many blog posts however, it also highlighted some interesting facts.
Many of my most popular posts are exercise posts. I admit I’m a little surprised at that because they’re also among my shortest—many of them come in at less than five hundred words. I was also a little surprised to find posts that focused on my personal process were among the top of the most-viewed list. Posts regarding general writing advice took up the middle, while genre-specific tips and techniques such as worldbuilding and tropes fell a little closer to the bottom. Short stories scattered all over the range, with The Spinning Wheel Trade landing among the top ten overall posts. Truth Vendor finished out on the bottom ten.
Some blog posts did well at first, grabbing higher numbers of initial views and then dropping off suddenly. Based off dates and trends, a large part of this is because the majority are older posts which got buried under newer content. A couple of these are from the first year and a half of blogging before I learned a few things. Most of these contain good ideas and content, but definitely need some updates. I’m working through those a bit at a time. I decided to focus only on posts from before 2020 for any updates, in part because there’s a lot of new material I want to write.
Going through each blog post also gave me a chance to realize I needed to clean up some of the tags on my posts. There’s a couple of them that have unnecessary variations in their tags, making them harder to find. There’s probably still a few of these I haven’t found yet that will get corrected eventually.
One of the big items on my list was an update to my logo. My little vixen was functional, but showing her age. Her updates turned out to be easier than expected, with cleaner linework and simplified colors in a fully digital media.
Along with updating my logo, I opted to update my WordPress theme, making navigation a little easier and giving me a little more ability to display the content I want featured—most notably my writing.
It also gave me a chance to update the information on all of my pages. For the most part, that was just updating the information in my About section, as well as making it a little clearer where else you can find me.
With all of that work done, it’s time to get back into my routine. You can start looking for prompts again starting next week, and regular posts should be back on Mondays and Fridays. With everything I’ve gotten done, there’s still a lot ahead. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next and where the journey takes me from here.
The Written Vixen 