So what happened to The Bitter Quill?
Well, the short answer is attrition.
The long answer: After a promising start, for seemingly unrelated and entirely legitimate reasons, four of the eight contributors to the site told me that they couldn’t spare the time to contribute anymore, all within the space of just over a week. One might suspect some sort of strange conspiracy, but I’m still friends with all of them, and to my knowledge I didn’t throw any Anna Wintouresque editorial hissyfits to drive them off, so I can only call it a highly unfortunate coincidence. It’s either that or my so-called friends actually burn with malice and harbor a well-hidden hatred for me, which I suppose is entirely possible as well.
Of the remaining four contributors, two never contributed more than one or two pieces each — essentially they had quit before they had even begun — and the remaining two, I among them, just sort of… lost heart. A good blog needs regular fresh content to keep going, and we just didn’t think we could keep it up. I really ought to have made some sort of official announcement, but I kept thinking I’d get around to restarting it one of these days, and the days turned to weeks, and the weeks to months… So the site languished for almost two years, unloved and unupdated.
Now, as I’m poised (at 5AM, flu-feverish and insomniac, but poised nevertheless) on the eve of trying to make it as a freelance writer, I think I’m going to repurpose TBQ as my personal writing blog. I’m going to track my submissions, writing progress, link to clips and published work and otherwise fill this space with the minutiae of my life in words and letters.
Or at least that’s the plan. Stay tuned and see how it goes.