From time to time I read these blog improvement posts such as the best time of the year to post to your blog and This is the MOST IMPORTANT BLOG POST of 2008, so READ IT!
This is the easiest thing you can do to attract clients on the web, and it’s free, and fast. I think these have value, and sometimes I even do them, though not always.
The harder thing is to find the balance. Mr. Dymowski wrote about some of this in his 10 things he’s learned about blogging, such as the balance between doing the blog and networking, or avoiding the blank page. Well, sometime during the month, I got unbalanced, maybe literally. I was away for three days at a work conference and I decided to write nothing. The upside is that I didn’t have to haul the laptop – which is REALLY slow – or go bother people to borrow their computers. And since I had content written for the days I was away, it didn’t have an immediate effect on the output.
So much of the time when I’m blogging, I write about what strikes the muse. So I might write a post about Flag Day – indeed, I already have, and you won’t see it until June 14. I’ve also finished my post for June 20 and August 10. Really. But without writing regularly, I found writing to suddenly become onerous.
Think about an exercise routine. You do it every day, or three times a week, and you take off a few days. If you’re like some people, it’s hard to get back into the groove. In fact, because I’ve missed riding my bike when I was away in April and again in May for the conference, and I didn’t feel well a couple of days, and it was cold and/or rainy a couple days, and Lydia was running late a couple days, I’ve ridden my bicycle far less at this point in the year than I have in previous years. Once I get derailed, it can be very difficult to get back on track.
Well, the same thing was true for blogging. I’m usually working at least a little bit ahead – I’m writing this on Friday morning before Lydia wakes up – but for the three days of the Memorial Day weekend, I had to get up and write something for the blog. What I realized: I HATE GETTING UP AND WRITING FOR THE BLOG. And, stupidly – you might think – I was writing at least some of those nights before, for a future post, because that’s where the muse took me.
Now, you might say, “Well, just pass on that day.” The trouble is that, to quote Billy Joel, “I go to extremes”. It was more like, “I think I’ll just quit blogging. Forever. Period.”
But that didn’t work, either. How do I explain this? All the things I used to sit around thinking about writing about, before I started blogging, would float in and out of my head, with no place to go. It was cacophonous, all the storylines in my brain. The GREAT thing about the blog is that it severely lessens the noise in my head. So, even if I don’t post it – and there are failed posts, posts I’ve written, but for whatever reason I never published – I still need to WRITE about. The blog is the methodology of publishing it, as it were, but the actual writing, removing certain stories from my mind into the keyboard, is a grand psychological release.
I saw Iron Man last weekend. My brain has composed what I THINK is a different POV on the movie. But until I actually write it down, and a musical I saw, and something that happened at the Greek festival, and some amazingly stupid and costly thing I did, it remains as an out-of-tune symphony in my head.
Specific to Memorial Day weekend, while I could have blown off two of the days, I could not have blown off the third. For that was the 26th of the month, and I seem to have a “contact with God” to write about Lydia on that date. (Which reminds me, I have this Will Eisner thing to write about.)
So I hope this view of my pathology makes sense. I believe it was inspired, at least a little bit, by this post from Mr. Velez. Thank you, Anthony.
ROG
