A year of not really blogging

A lot of drafts.

Short posts I should have just hit publish on.

I did not even publish enough posts to make my default pagination hit the second page.

I did have a great year though, including three months in Japan in which I was only rarely tempted to blog, and now almost wish I'd put the effort into. There's a couple of stub posts and notes, but my main instrument was really the camera. I didn't feel like cracking out the laptop to jot down my thoughts most evenings. I didn't even have it with me for weeks at a time as we went bikepacking across Hokkaido. Maybe a retrospective photo blog?

I helped wind down the last company I worked for in January, then I started a new one.

When it comes to writing though, even with the blog, I mostly did what I usually do. I wrote up comments on Hacker News and deleted them before hitting submit.

I jotted down vague ideas for posts in the Notes app – though I did more of this in the blog editor. Looking back over the last year of them, it seems I still can't shake the occasional desire to comment on global affairs/politics. Maybe I should just write these articles up fully and never publish them, just to get the ideas out of my head; and practice writing.

I've really enjoyed working on the blogging software itself, not that I've spent a huge amount of time tinkering with it since January. The original risk I anticipated was that I would agonize over building the blog in and then never even start. I forgot that anything that is not easy to do is something you have to put continuous, deliberate effort into.

So what to do?

The fact that I've written so little makes me wonder whether I even want to write? Surely I would be making the time! I would have pages and pages to show for the amount of time that has passed.

I still believe writing well is an incredible talent, even more so in a time where mere lexical coherence is no longer a sign that a human being has been thinking somewhere.

The fact that I'm writing even this is probably enough of an indicator that I still want to keep doing it.

I guess I should return to Jeff Triplett's words that started me back blogging in the first place:

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

Maybe they'll sink in this time.

There is currently no comments system. If you'd like to share an opinion either with me or about this post, please feel free to do so with me either via email (ross@duggan.ie) on Mastodon (@duggan@mastodon.ie) or even on Hacker News.