Hey, I know this blog doesn’t have a lot of traction yet, but there are at least a few people following it through Google Reader or other means. For those I just wanted to saw sorry nothing happened over the last week. My wife and I decided to spend the last week doing a crazy amount of house work. The place is starting to look nice. We’ve got some new furniture, thrown out some old, rearranged every room, hung some new curtains and rid ourselves of a lot of junk. It’s been nice to get it done while we both had a lot of time to use up this past week, but it’s kept me away from any writing, blogging or social media.
I will be getting back to normal now. For this blog I want normal to be at least 3 posts a week and I’d be happier with a post daily. We’ll see how that goes for the rest of the summer.
Sometimes you just have to live your life. Every once in a while I’ll shut off the computer for a couple of days and my wife and I will drive up the coast, just soak up some sun, look at the ocean, and actually interact with people face to face.
I try to keep a strict schedule when it comes to my legitimate writing, but I’ve long since abandoned setting rules for myself when it comes to blogging. I post when I have something to say. If that’s once a month, so be it. If it’s more often, great. I know there are people out there who would balk at this, but I don’t really care. Some people are career bloggers. I’m not. I find that if I’m always focused on my next blog post, or my next tweet, or whatever it is that ‘they’ tell me I need to do to build a ‘platform’, then I’m not thinking about the next story, which is the whole reason I got into this in the first place. I’ve also decided to quit writing about writing, because there are a million other writers more qualified than I to carry that torch. I love talking to writers, but I want to attract READERS, and I don’t think the average reader wants to ‘hear’ me talk about story structure and character.
Didn’t mean to go off on a rant, but I guess your post pushed a button. I’d also stress that I’m speaking strictly for myself here, about what works for me right now.
Hey Nathan – I pretty much agree with everything you say here. For me it’s a matter of building more discipline in all aspects of my life. Left unattended I’m far too likely to look at a clock, see its 1:00am and say, “Wow. What the heck did I do with my day?” This is especially true for the month or two of summer and winter when I don’t have to go to work. This use to be fine, but now that I’m writing I want more structure.
So I try to set rules for myself about the things I really want to do because being disciplined about things like the blogging helps keep me more disciplined for things like writing too. I should mention though that I don’t beat myself up over these “rules”. Really, they’re more like ideal goals and I don’t expect to always hit them. When I don’t, I consider why, but I don’t worry. And like you, this is just what works for me.