When Heather posted that we'd gotten 'niches' as our theme for the week, I was studying for my last exam style assignment of the term. My head went down on my desk and I sighed.
Its not that bad really, but its kind difficult to point at my niche, given I'm deliberately diverse, indulgent, and to be quite honest, in pop culture circles, a bit of an oddity. In my OWN circle, not so much, but we attract folk like ourselves, so that's not - really a surprise either.
I'm deliberately diverse because I have stupid amounts of productive time on my hands - though I'm a full time student, full time mother, full time writer, I still get around 10k of work done, on my WORST weeks. Not including Uni work. On my good weeks I'm 10k at Uni and 25k or so at home.
I used to be 5k a day, rain or shine, needing it or not, but we moved so I lost that knack to do it consistently. Its slowly coming back though. The point being - when there are so many 'nice' fiction niches out there, would YOU want to stick to one? I'll also admit to getting slightly bored in just one niche. I might have been considerably more successful, but boredom is something that really bothers me. More importantly though, in non fiction and 'real life' circles there are certain areas that I'm an 'expert' or have information in that others might need - raising a child that may or may not have a conflict spectrum disorder (http://theoddchild.co.uk) - bi-polar disorder (http://bi-polarbears.com) and gaming, as a girl (http://irlfemale.com).
And that's where the 'indulgent' thing comes in. I am incredibly indulgent - and spoil myself like a child in a candy store when it comes to writing. I like to write as much as I can, on as diffuse an amount of topics, without losing the focus I already created for myself, because it keeps my writing skills sharp.
And as I said, I'm also an oddity. I'm equally at home in writing geek type pieces for tech sites, or gamers - and in the next breath (essay) I could be writing on parenting, design, artwork, the act of writing itself, Uni...you name it. I like being this way, it gives me scope for comfort, grace, and the sheer joy of sharing and being read by others. And ultimately, that's more important to me than a niche - knowing that somewhere I've entertained, supported, helped, amused or engaged my readers. And living in a thousand niches feels far better to me than missing that and supporting only one. So yeah, my niche is blank - a blank canvas, an ever filling cup. A blank page , that sometimes, mocks me. Its not perfect, but it is enjoyable, most of the time.
It has lead to problems however - I'm STILL trying to find a good bio that sums up who I am, what I do, and how good (or bad) I am at it ;)
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
My niche is ________ (its a BIG niche)
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2 comments:
You're a lot like me, in that I have trouble coming up with a bio. But I write on almost none of the same topics as you, so there must be some way for us to at least loosely define and differentiate our "niches."
Hm. My bio could be, "I write about almost everything. Kai writes about everything else."
Ya think?
lol...well, that way we could double team the market ;)
Maybe our next 'project' could be 'bio'ing one another. I've always found that my other half has a better idea of how to describe me than I do, so maybe its just that we're too close to it.
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