Saturday 7 May 2016

Blog Neglect

When I first started up my blog I was going to write an entry every single day. I know, I can hear you laughing from here.

It may surprise you to know that I did exactly that for much (not all) of the first year of my blog. I was a good little blogger, regularly blogging about the things that filled my little blogging mind. Some of them were even of interest to other people.

Then I started to resent the thirty minutes of time I spent writing my blog in the evening. Why, I could use that time to do actual writing for books that I could sell!

So I gradually tapered my blogs down to every other day instead. It may surprise you to learn that I did not use the freed up time to write. I used that time to watch more telly and Face more book.

Then I discovered that every other day comes around almost as often as every day. It’s like, every day with only one day in-between. So I thought about investing even less time in my blog (because, after all, I could use that time to write real books yada-yada-yada).

During my sabbatical I made the final call to seriously decrease, and after tapering off to once every three days or so, I abruptly moved to once a week.

Once a week is fine, I told myself. It’s often enough to keep me in the habit, but not so often that it feels intrusive. Why, I bet that after a week of not blogging I’ll look forward to writing my blog!

I know. I can hear you laughing from here.

So, I reduced it down to once a week. I also started up a newsletter that I sent out to my newsletter subscribers once a week. That’s two things a week I was writing.

After a month I felt justified dropping it back to once a fortnight just to even things out.

Then, the other day at work, someone was looking at my blog. They were looking for something specific and complaining that they couldn’t find it because whoever designed my website had neglected to install a search button on my blog. I countered that I couldn’t be bothered installing one and building a website from the ground up is a much bigger project than they realise, thank you very much.

I also tried to remember the last time I’d written a blog entry. Like my old blog entries. Not one of my, “I have a book to promote,” blog entries.

It was hard to recall and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by looking it up, but I thought that I should probably get right on that.

So, here I am. Getting right on that. After a pause of a day or two to collect myself.

In the brilliance of late night decisions that I’ll no doubt regret in the morning, I’ve decided to go back to blogging every day. I doubt this will curtail my writing, although it scares me that it may claw seriously into my gazing blankly at Facebook time.

If you don’t want to receive an entry every single day, you may want to get out now. I mean to keep this up!

Yeah, I know.

I can hear you laughing from here.

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