Social Distancing, COVID-19, and Being a Writer

Right now, there’s a whole lot of THIS going around. For several writers (who are also introverts), the idea of staying home for two weeks to self-quarantine is a dream come true. The ability to write to your hearts content, avoid the general public, and bask in the warm glow of books all day long? Who doesn’t picture that as being Elysian? But for those of us who also market our own stories, it becomes a Herculean task to do this via social media only. Not only are there algorithms and hashtags to master, ads to purchase and design, and non-stop postings to be done, but there is the simple truth that putting your book in the hands of a physical customer has a beauty to it that can’t be equaled by online sales.

When I’m not writing and attempting to market my own books, I work as a salesperson. I spend day in and day out selling product to customers, convincing them what choice is best for them and how much fun they’ll have with said item. I’ve been doing this job for nearly 13 years. When I have the opportunity to attend a convention or an event where I can push my own wares, I get to reach people on a different level, a more personal level than I would just letting my books go in e-tail platforms.

That’s why I was so hyped to be doing not one but two big events this spring, events I spent a good deal of money on, and in addition to that, spent money on promotional items for said events as well. I was looking forward to getting people excited about my newest book and creating hype.

And then the Corona Virus happened.

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New posts, new book, new everything!

We’re changing things up a bit here at The *all new* Kat at Night blog. Along with re-branding comes serving new content for the masses. I’ve decided on a few different blog series to incorporate into The Kat at Night that might be some fun for both me and you. I also have a new book coming out in the fall which we’ll talk about a little bit, as well as some upcoming events you can find me at in the spring!

But now, a moment to speak about old series posts here. I will not be continuing Inspiration Through Music, though I would like to incorporate a music-themed blog here on the site. Cooking Adventures will be getting a bit of a make-over in that I will be returning to blogging my adventures versus vlogging them. My video equipment is unfortunately outdated and unable to make a video in a timely fashion. The last Cooking Adventure video I made took me nearly a week to edit because of corrupting video files. Suffice to say, I will try to provide plenty of photos to illustrate the future adventures well.

Now, onto new blog series!

We Switched Names…Again

That’s right. Hopefully, this will be the last time.

Getting back into the swing of things here at (now) The Kat at Night, we will be exploring this blog as it transitions into a discussion about writing dark things, particularly my affinity to doing this. We’ll also have the odd discussions here and there about other things dark like films and music, cats, coffee… you know… generally dark things.

The purpose for all of this tom-foolery? Rebranding is hard. I had, at one point, hoped that I might be better at reaching out to the writing community and possibly get others to post guest blogs or be able to connect on a more vast scale with writers of every genre. Those are pretty big goals to achieve on a fledgling blog that gets very few views because of intermittent posts by its only author.

Returning to a more simple, practice of sharing myself with the writing world is more my speed, and definitely more up my alley.

So, here we are with The Kat at Night.

I’ll be posting at night (of course) on subjects relating to dark fiction and my approach to it and soon enough, others approaches to it, too. I had thought maybe I would have the workings for a podcast here but decided against the latter. We’ll start with a blog and move on from there.

Until our next (actually first) post under a new name,

KSilva