Winter has settled in here. Snow days, wind chills in the minus teens, slippery sidewalks, and shivering robins, still hanging around in the crabapple trees when they should be in Georgia or Florida.

It should be a good time for writing, but lately I’ve been focussed on websites and search engine optimization and Google analytics and other such arcane and here-to-fore unknown subjects, all to increase traffic to my website and blog and eventually to sales of my book. Or so I hope.

There appear to be as many people trying to make a dollar from exploitation of a writer’s work online as there are in the print world. I see sites with books by agents and marketers, ezines,  selling the surest route to a best seller, if only the author would take an eight hundred dollar course, and oh, bye the way sign up three friends to  get fifty per cent off,  and  others offering to rewrite the opus, and then it would sell millions of copies and be the next Harry Potter.

As I struggle through SEO for Dummies, and Blogging ditto, I wonder what would be wrong with writing just for me. But then I would just have to think, and remember and never write at all. Writing only has value and purpose, to my way of thinking, if shared.