4 June 2021

Every day I spend a good amount of time deleting emails. People everywhere seem to want to either know something, or to sell me something. They either want to know whether my trip to their supermarket, where I bought milk and bread, met my expectations. Or maybe, because I bought a car three years ago, I’d like to buy another one. My delete finger gets a good workout.

I paused briefly in my deleting today, when I saw an email telling me how to make money out of writing blogs. Well….you do know I write these things because I enjoy it, and so forth…..but if there was a chance to make money out of it??? Well, I like money as much as the next person. And my car is now three years old, and that bottle of milk is almost empty.

Apparently, first and foremost, the only way you will make money out of writing blogs is if you have a niche.

Oh well – hit delete and move on to the next email asking me if I’d like to see some Irish dancing show. Because I don’t have a niche when it comes to writing, and that is part of my joy, but also part of my roadblock. I would like to be able to write a book someday, or a blog that draws in the thousands of people and the sponsorship that could bring, but my brain never stays on one track long enough.

There are people around who are specialists in particular subjects, and I have a lot of admiration for them. I enjoy reading stuff about parenting and families (inspired in my younger years by Erma Bombeck, among others) – with humour being the primary attraction. I don’t really do serious. I would avoid reading books about how to properly toilet train a child, in preference for books that tell you how to avoid your child while it toilet trains itself, possibly while drinking red wine hiding in the laundry cupboard.

I also love reading about history, but again the funnier the better. One of my mothers’ books that I loved to read (and possibly stole it from her, but let’s not get into what a bad job she did bringing me up….) was called “The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody”. It gave me enough of a history lesson in amongst the laughs.

I’d like to think that if I had a niche, it might be humour. But it’s more likely to be that scattergun mentality that epitomises literary diarrhoea.

Do you have a niche? Something you excel at, far ahead of everything else you do? Do you know a lot about a particular subject that people would pay to read?

If it’s funny, I’d sign up for it. It would give me something to read when I’m in the laundry cupboard while #1 grandson toilet trains himself.

Refill my wine glass first, won’t you?