Back To The Blog

Back to the blog.   It’s been awhile since I’ve writ­ten any­thing (56 days since my last post), and that’s quite a bit for some­one that was doing mul­ti­ple posts a day.   My lifestream shows I was doing some­thing online, but noth­ing with the blog.  I did apply for a blog­ging posi­tion with Geek­dad (since I now qual­ify) when they had an open invi­ta­tion for any and all to sign up.  I did not make the cut, since it was a non pay­ing posi­tion there wasn’t much I really lost, but I did get my hopes up.

I still have to write about Lex’s time in the hos­pi­tal. I have other projects that I’ve done that I need to write about, so much writ­ing to do and so lit­tle time.   My wife who only writes once in a blue moon beat me to writ­ing about the birth expe­ri­ence.  She was sure I was going to get it done first, but time and effort   One thing I have noticed is that the longer you go with­out writ­ing the eas­ier it is.  You can say well I have writ­ten this long, what is one more day — then it’s one more week.   What was planned to be two-three weeks turned into just about two months.   I have been doing emails, respond­ing on Face­book and Twit­ter, and other low time (and cre­ative) invest­ment activ­i­ties.   Being lazy is way too easy.  It also makes me under­stand the other side of the coin.

Xie has asked me many times how I have so much to write about.  I always responded that once you get in the forced habit of spend­ing time and effort in putting some­thing down it becomes rou­tine and it’s easy to do.    You can pick up sto­ries that you remem­ber or just inane chat­ter that gives you prac­tice in writ­ing.  It’s the prac­tice that makes you bet­ter and gives you the sto­ries that really stand out.  It goes the other way too I’ve found out.   With­out get­ting deep into the habit ofreg­u­larly writ­ing it becomes a strug­gle.   Heck this post alone has been almost 3 weeks in the mak­ing and went through dif­fer­ent revi­sions.  In the end I scrapped every­thing I had writ­ten before and going through the gru­el­ing task of get­ting some­thing out there.   I never thought that tak­ing a break would lead to this.    I have had a moun­tain of things to write about, con­cern­ing the baby, con­cern­ing pol­i­tics, con­cern­ing tech­nol­ogy, etc. etc.   The prob­lem was tak­ing the time to get it down on the screen.

The cop out answer for all of this is the birth of the baby.   That really isn’t a good excuse since I learned I can pound out a 500 word essay in 12 min­utes.  I could have eas­ily writ­ten some­thing in that great span of 56 days, heck a good por­tion of my posts are not even 500 words long, so under a ten minute sneak here or there would have got­ten the job done.   I am extremely busy because of the baby, both directly and indi­rectly but if I have time to watch a video — I have time to pound out a blog post.  What is what it’s going to be for awhile.

What does this mean though?  Well first don’t expect mul­ti­ple posts a day for at least a cou­ple months from me.   I don’t have the time to write drafts for future pub­lish­ing, so I can’t queue  up enough to get a weeks straight of posts done.   I have some plans for that, and there is going to be some pos­si­bly unin­ter­est­ing writ­ing ahead.   One of the things that may turn out bor­ing (or awe­some) is that I’ll work through all the Plinky prompts I’ve been ignor­ing.  I sub­scribed to their feed for writ­ing inspi­ra­tion, but the ques­tions never really felt like they fit in the tone of the blog, well they do now.   Moti­va­tion is weak and to get back in the swing of things, this what I have to do.

The most inter­est­ing thing I’ve noticed is that while my RSS feed has had a bit of a falling off of sub­scribers, my nor­mal web hits are only down 20–30%.  I guess I’ve writ­ten enough stuff that Google has indexed that has been deemed hit wor­thy.   That at least makes me happy, or you guys just miss me so much that you are read­ing my old stuff over and over again (I guess you like to tor­ture yourself).

I’m get­ting into ram­ble mode now, while good for my writ­ing — it’s bad for a coher­ent post.  I’ll stop.   My toes are dip­ping back into the water and I’m sure I’ll be swim­ming like a fish again in no time.