We all feel your pain (and would hate to lose your important voice).

For the longest time, I read and believed "the answer" was to write every day, and keep feeding the beast, but that can be grueling, and it can be super frustrating when one story gets thousands of views (and a nice payoff) while far more get what? Twenty views and less than a dollar?

So you instead think, "Well, I need more stories that make money and fewer of the 10 cents stories."

So maybe the answer isn't quitting but rather, scaling back to fewer stories, with more focus on giving that ideal reader exactly what he or she wants? And then using that extra time (from doing fewer stories) to write or do other things to earn the dough?

I really don't know if that's the best answer, but I do know I wrote less last month and made more though this month looks meager. There's definitely a cycle and a rhythm to it we all struggle to find.

The one constant? When we think of giving up, something happens to make us think, "Oh, there's that hope I was waiting for..."