Three Things: Blogging, a personal struggle

Confession time: I’m a horrible blogger.

My intentions are always great when I get excited about doing this. As I’d alluded to in last week’s article, I’d had regular blogging as a goal for 2020 before, well, the world went and upended itself.

In a small, secret space in my brain, I was kind of happy. Because it meant I didn’t need to follow through. But now, here we are in a new year, and I’m all out of excuses.

Well, not really. My work is still pretty banging hard (just a slower pace than “frantic”), and I’m sure I can manufacture other excuses. But honestly, it’s time to face the music and write.

So, here’s three things about blogging that I’ve scraped together in the course of getting this week’s offering together.

The topical desert

I’ve so many topics I could blog about under this ‘three things’ moniker. Particular books and movies, hobbies, interests, bits of info, and learning objectives from various professional development courses, random home things…cats… The list is pretty endless.

Maybe too endless?

Over the course of the last 48 hours alone, I’ve started five articles. (This is number six.) But they’ve ended up either spiraling into wandering nostalgia, or way off the point, or in one case, smashed into a dead end. (Honest. I couldn’t go any farther as I wrote myself neatly into a corner.)

And right out of the gate, I’m wrestling with how to tie my points together. Should they be a cohesive whole, tethered together to lead you to a profound thought? Because that scares me; pretty sure I’m barely filled with any profundity to dole out to all of you. I respect you too much as a reader to pretend I’m some kind of wise.

Which path to follow?

Should I ramble, keeping it to three points, and hope there’s a mystical connection that only you, dear reader, can make? If so, please tell me about it, so I don’t feel like it’s the journal entries of a person on the bus to Crazy Town. (I prefer Funky Town, myself, but that’s the Wang Chung in me talking.)

Believe me; I’d love to share about my adoration of Lego, Star Wars, the MCU, and my struggles to be a great gamemaster for my players. (If you don’t understand that last bit, politely nod and keep reading.) But I always feel like that topic also needs to have a point. Otherwise, it’s just a word collection strung together to sound vaguely cohesive.

Guess I’ll figure it out as I go forward with this experiment.

Creative overload

As I mentioned, I apparently like a LOT of things. Fortunately, I’m cognizant of physical space constraints, so that doesn’t really translate into actual stuff. Whew. I’d hate to go through another collection culling; I’m still finding random metal bits from my last obsession involving miniatures, terrain, and paint.

I’ve got to calm down and simmer down my enthusiasm to three concise, particular points. After all, that’s part of the reason I wanted to continue the whole “three things” concept. It’s built to keep you interested without going on and on and on and on about something, which is, coincidentally, probably why people ignore me at parties now. (And I’m okay with that, being a super-introvert.)

I need to keep reminding myself that I don’t have to shove all of my thoughts about something into one article. Being specific means, I can find another angle to address later. Of course, that means clever convolutions of titling – which, honestly, is a good thing. I’ve always preferred short titles, but “good SEO practice” (i.e., what my plugin tells me on the back end) is longer titles.

Guess I’ll find a compromise somewhere.

Being sensitive

Huh?

Well, yeah. I mean, I could easily flip this and make it a weekly scribe about something current. Among my ideas for this week’s article that I mentioned earlier? My thoughts on insurrection and our current partisan society; the start of hockey this week amidst continually peaking COVID counts; Christmas decor and when it comes down.

I started articles on all three but had to abandon them. (See above as to why. I’ll wait.) Ultimately, for me, they just didn’t fit what I felt I really wanted to share at this time. Because make no mistake; we’re still in the thick of things, and it’s not settling down quietly or easily.

What’s the point then?

I’ve always tried to use my words to thoughtfully inform or lift through a quiet perspective in my writing. And none of those ideas really gave me that outcome. At the moment, anyway. With time and all that, you may yet see them surface. And probably when those things are not so sensitive to what context we exist in today. (I’ll go ahead and slate that Christmas one for late summer, just to be sure.)

I guess the bottom line through these points is; I’m still in learning mode with this. It’s a familiar feeling, at least. Back in 2017, I’d challenged myself to make a Lego minifigure-themed photo a day and attempted to capture them all through the year. (I did, mostly.) You can peruse them all here on Facebook. Some are great, and others are “Eh? What were you thinking?” But I learned as I went about many different things: creative approach, planning, lighting, editing, positioning, and so on.

And it was a lot of fun.

That’s what this new venture really is: a stretch and a push at one of my greatest strengths: creativity.

Let’s see how it goes.

Talk next time; stay safe.