Wednesday, January 5, 2011

And because I'm lazy, there's at least a 24 delay on getting these things posted

Getting increasingly difficult to think of something to write about every single day. On the other hand, still very much wanting to, just drawing a blank when it’s coming to thinking of anything suitable.

(On an aside, got my 500 in for yesterday, just haven’t gotten around to uploading it yet as it’s an actual article I need to post to AC.)

That seems to be a problem a lot of the time with me, coming up with ideas as what to do actually do. I’d like to think I’m a pretty creative person, but I have the hardest damned time being creative on demand. I suspect (and hope) that I just need to be a tiny bit more organised and methodical about actually sitting down and writing. This, of course, is the exact reason I’m still making myself do 500 words on an empty tank.

That really seems to be the advice of any modern, successful writer, incidentally. They say, without trying to be too sarcastic, that to be a writer, you actually need to write stuff. Write stuff, and keep writing, and finish what you’re writing.

They also mention that reading voraciously is just as important as writing things. However, I don’t think ‘not reading enough’ is ever going to seriously make it onto my list of character flaws.

Stumbleupon also occasionally brings up random advice articles about writing blogs (usually on someone’s blog, for extra degree of meta), despite my best efforts to ‘train’ it not to. They offer all kinds of advice on how to start and maintain a blog, but I suspect the blogs they’re talking about and the blogs I’m talking about wouldn’t meet on a Venn diagram. Theirs seem to either be carefully crafted tools designed to lure unsuspecting web tourists into a whirpool of Search Engine Optimisation and targeted marketing, or blogs with a singleminded obsession with a particular subject that’s quite terrifying. They’re usually about something most people wouldn’t waste writing a paragraph about, but these folk apparently burn with the fire of a thousand suns for particular method of knitting or countertop refinishing.

I definitely don’t want that. I’m passionate about many things, but not to the point where I want to talk about it online every single bloody day, to the point where I’m paddling in the shallow end of the Asperger’s pool. And I certainly don’t want a blog capable of pulling in thousands of hits but having the personality and creativeness of a knife between the ribs. I would rather have absolutely no-one ever read this, and be happy with what I’ve tapped out here.

That being said, the same doesn’t /quite/ apply to stuff I write up for AC. I crossed the Rubicon of shamelessness for money there some time back, when I was being paid a few bucks for writing articles about things like ‘care of leather upholstery’ and ‘installing a dimmer switch’. In other words subjects which I had absolutely no idea about, and never would, but which Google did... It’s amazing how quickly you can learn enough to sound like an expert on something in 350 words or more. Though it’s less amazing how quickly you can forget this useless, useless, information.

I dunno. I think it’ll come together eventually. At least I’m not tooling about with flash memory cards and interface issues any more.

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