Daily Blogging

by

The Routine

For awhile now I have thought about breaking the habit of daily blogging, but honestly there is a bit of fear in it.  I got into a small thread on twitter yesterday about this topic and Wilhelm outlines my biggest fear.  If I stopped blogging every single day…  I question if I would ever start back up again.  The irony of this daily blogging thing… is that when I started it I went from being one of the least prolific bloggers to one of the most…  almost over night.  I started doing this daily blogging routine in April of 2013.  My blog however was started in April of 2009, and during those first four years I only managed to make 148 posts.  The largest lapse without any posts was between August of 2012 and April of 2013.  Ultimately my fear is that if I stop the routine… I will go back to that… because of the posts on my blog 1018 happened after I forced myself into this routine.  Ultimately this is part of my schtick, that I tell folks during the Newbie Blogger Initiative and Blaugust is that once upon a time I used to be one of the least regular bloggers out there, but I started down a path….  and quite honestly I am now a bit scared to ever step off of it.

The truth is, my blog started out as a thing largely about gaming but has turned into something more than that.  I never really kept a diary or a journal, but in essence that is what this blog has become.  These are the chronicles of my adventures, mistakes and all of the various things that happen in between.  Over the years I got considerably more personal, and have shared some pretty private stuff with my blog readers.  When something bad has happened in my life, you have been there with me… and often times supporting me.  When there has been a victory…  you have all shared in the glory.  Admittedly there are a lot of details that I leave off the page.  For example I don’t usually mention my wife or family members by name.  In theory I could give a name to her… the way my friend Grace does her husband…  but there is not a nickname that I call her with enough consistency as to make that not feel artificial.  Over the years I’ve created a bit of a rule set that I try and follow.

  • Don’t call people out by name (unless they have called me out first)
  • If something bad happens, focus on the event and not the people
  • If something good happens, talk about the people who made it good
  • Try and remain positive, and not get bogged down in the depression
  • Even though I am filtering…  be honest about my own failures
  • Be humble and thankful that anyone reads my blog at all

The Benefit

I have of course failed at all of them at some point or another, but those are the basic guidelines that I think about when I am writing.  When folks think about this whole daily blogging thing, they tend to focus on the negative.  Sure it is tedious to get up every morning and knock out a blog post before I leave the house.  On the weekends, and when I am taking a day off like I did today I tend to give myself a little more breathing room.  However most of the time like clockwork I can knock out a blog post in thirty minutes to an hour depending on how much I get distracted.  The only day it wears on me is Sundays, when I have to prepare both a podcast episode and knock out a blog post before I can really get on with my day.  For a long time I was staying up until one or two in the morning editing AggroChat but I’ve recently started just heading to bed after the initial first pass.  If I get up at a decent hour I can knock out all of my bloggy/podcasty duties before my wife gets home from church, which gives us a better start to the day.

There is however a lot of benefit to getting up every morning and writing a post.  In many ways the act of writing about something, helps me investigate it further.  I will turn an idea over in my head, and through writing often process my feelings.  There is something about placing words on a page that makes it more “real” for me.  There is also the benefit of having a written log of everything I did during the year.  Each major event, ends up finding its way into my posts in one form or another, so in essence I am externalizing my memory.  So if I wanted to know the weekend I did this, or that… there is almost always a footnote somewhere in my blog about it that I can search later and place specific dates to memories.  Not sure exactly why, but there is something comforting about this… being able to look up with certainty when something happened in the past, and I have three years of my life documented like this now.

The Readers

The part of the equation that I have not sorted out however, is why the hell I have actual readers that continue to grow over the years.  At this point…  they have to be in this because they care about me, and not necessarily what I happen to be saying.  That proposition in itself is so damned strange.  There is this huge part of me that cannot fathom why more of you have not wandered off in boredom by now.  I do not lead an exciting life, and I tend to fall into the same routines in whatever I happen to be playing.  The truth is I have nothing terribly profound to say, and just represent your average person applying fingers to the keyboard.  I am blessed with some amazing friends, but it still shocks me when I meet someone and they tell me that they have read my blog for a long period of time.  I just want to ask them why?  At some point I stopped doing this because blogging seemed to be what the cool kids were doing.  I guess in truth I do the daily routine for me, and because it makes me feel like I am accomplishing something every morning before I even leave the house.  I get more out of this than I think anyone might realize.  I have this open dialog with the world, but in truth I am mostly talking to myself.  I am putting into print things I need to tell myself, and through the act of writing them out…  I actually take the time to listen.

 

11 thoughts on “Daily Blogging”

  1. I feel a little differently about posting frequency. Every day is definitely too much. I can do it but quality definitely suffers. However, far from finding better things to do or losing interest or motivation when I go a few days longer than usual between posts I find I start to get antsy with unexpressed ideas that jostle around in my head looking for an outlet.

    The sweet spot for me is probably around four times a week but it does depend on what’s going on, obviously. It would be a rare week when I didn’t come up with three things I want to bang on about but a rarer one when I came up with five or more.

  2. Now waiting for comments on my blog inviting me to take a week off…

    I always wonder about the “calling somebody out” thing. On the one hand, I don’t want to be a complete ass and get into a bloggy slap fight. But then I’ve read a couple of bloggers who are clearly calling somebody out for something regularly, but are being coy about it with words like “some gamers” and the like, which always strikes me as ineffective because that could be just their strawman argument. (And now, of course, I want to name a couple of offenders on that front, but I won’t.)

    In the end my blog also tends to be more a diary of my own thoughts and experiences with gaming, so I don’t get into a lot of situations where calling somebody out would even be a possibility. I mostly just link out to other people posting on similar topics, which is sort of positive linkage as opposed to negative linkage.

    • Friends are my weakness. Like if someone is picking on me, more than often I just let it slide. But when someone starts picking on my friends I tend to get protective. It hasn’t happened that often… but the few times it did happen I regretted the sequence of events later. The bullet points are mostly just things I try and keep in the back of my head when I want to talk about things that involve others. Like if someone screwed up in a raid… I might talk about the situation but I wouldn’t talk about a person. If someone did a clutch save and pulled out a fight at the last minute…. I will absolutely brag on that person directly by name. Mostly I just try not to say negative things…. and when I can’t help myself… I try never to call someone out by name, or with enough detail that anyone other than the folks directly involved might know about it. If that fails well… then I suck and I end up feeling bad about it later.

      In truth you can find plenty of examples of every single one of those items where I have failed on my blog if you go looking.

  3. Unfortunately, I don’t think Bullet Point One and Bullet Point Two always work as intended. Individually, maybe, but in tandem in some cases the timing of a post about a situation that might coincide with an event that a reader was part of doesn’t have to name names in order for someone to recognize — rightly so or not — that they’re being called out.

    Jussayins

    • Yeah I admitted above that it doesn’t always work as intended, but those are largely my goals. I mean if I talk about a situation, if folks understand that situation there is zero way for the folks involved to not understand what I am talking about. But then if I don’t talk about a situation, and it effected me adversely… then I am not being honest so yeah… it is a paradox. Luckily it doesn’t come up that often.

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