The 2012 State of the Blog: Making Arrangements

I’ve been spending a bunch of time over the last couple weeks considering the state of the blog for 2012.  The good news for those of you who care about such things is that it will continue.  The better news is that if everything goes according to plan I’ll probably actually be writing more.  At least I plan to write more consistently.

My current plan is as follows:  three or four long posts per week with some form of daily quick hit something or other.  I’m not quite sure what the quick hits will be as of yet.  It might just be a few links.  It might be a paragraph on something or other that has happened in the past 24 hours.  It might be a picture of a dog or a thing in the streets of Chicago.  It might be something about some new music or a book or something.  IT MIGHT BE YOUR HEAD ON A PIKE.

Did that last one scare you?  Good.  I want you on your toes.

Basically, my goal for 2012 is to make at least one post per weekday.  This is all part of a not-exactly-disguised quest to drive circulation, as “posting shit at least once a day, preferably more often” seems to be something the successful blogs I read have in common.  If I do it right this also means I’ll be able to spread the writing out and set certain things to just auto-post at the right time.  I experimented with that for three or four weeks in the fall and it worked really well from my end.

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Part two of my four part plan to do something with this blog is to tighten it up.  I’ve gotten in the habit of writing a lot of lazy, self-indulgent personal posts that, quite frankly, I can’t see too many people caring about.  I’ve basically turned this blog in to a personal story time blog, which I kinda-sorta swore I would never do when I started doing this way back in the day.  I barely care about what I did yesterday, so I have no idea why you would, either.

This is actually somewhat awkward, too, since a few of my personal posts double as some of my favorite things I’ve ever written.  As such I don’t want to just completely reject the notion of telling personal stories, as sometimes the personal can transcend the merely personal and become universal.  As far as I’m concerned, that idea is the cornerstone of storytelling.

It’s also fascinating for me to open up something I wrote a year and a half ago and realize I was working through something that I’m working on now and I’ve completely forgotten about it.  That becomes a two-edged sword, though.  On the one side I’ve got the whole learning and growing thing, which is always nice.  On the other side I’ve got to wonder if I’m just picking at scabs and avoiding making use of obvious lessons so that I can have continued writing fodder.

There’s also the problem that I can’t completely obliterate personal stories from this site.  Some of the things I write about come from personal stuff, after all.  Some things require me to explain how I got to where I was.  Perhaps I’ll just work on doing a better job of filtering out the self-indulgent crap and only letting the personal-universal stuff make it through.

And that right there was an in-text footnote.  Eh, what’re you gonna do?

Anyway, he said immediately after wandering off course, I’m planning on tightening up the writing around here.  As I write this on New Year’s Day 2012 I have a few hobbyhorses I want to ride around.  I’m planning on making my blogging more-or-less fit within the scope of these issues.  Fortunately, they’re pretty widely defined, so there should be ample opportunity to write about any number of topics.  These are the buckets in to which I intend to toss most of my long posts, however (listed in order of me thinking about them):

1.  The Single Life.  I actually enjoy writing the single life posts.  It’s where I will get in to the most personal stuff, for what seems like obvious reasons, especially in light of things that you will not know until tomorrow.  However, I’m planning on making this more universal, since I’m going to try to focus on how single people approach each other.  This will also dovetail with the next big bucket.

2.  Feminism/ZOMG Teh Menz!/Gender Issues.  I tend to write about this stuff specifically in relation to dating and whatnot, but not always.  I want to spend more time exploring the mentality of the Pick-Up Artist and Men’s Rights Activist communities.  Otherwise, I want to look at how men and women interact with each other in general, anyway.  Because it’s interesting, that’s why.

3.  On Writing/Storytelling.  This should come as no surprise.  I still want to talk about worldbuilding in story and I’m sure I’ll come up with other things.  I’d like to take some time to write book reviews, too.  I'm pretty sure I’ve been saying that for at least three years by now.

4.  History.  I’d hope this is a no-brainer, but I haven't used the tag since September.  I do want to go back to the well more often in 2012, however.  I keep thinking I should get back to Byzantine Logic if nothing else.  And I’m hoping to find more time to talk about obscure historical stuff like my Battleships posts and my occasional need to talk about Prester John.  I imagine I’ll end up discussing history in light of current politics, too, what with this being an election year in the United States.

5.  Religion/Apologetics.  My first Perspectives and Apologetics post went well, I think.  I’ve actually got part 2 mostly written and I suspect it won’t stop there.  I’m planning on writing a lot about how perspectives color the interactions of the apologist.  I suppose this will be somewhat related to the gender relation topics, too.

6.  Toxic Attitudes/On Disagreement.  These are two new topics I want to write more about.  Basically, I want to spend more time working through how people interact and debate with each other.  It should be obvious that these topics fit in to the previous five buckets.

It’s entirely possible you won’t see any real differences in my blog if you’re looking based on this list.  It’s pretty much what I talk about now, anyway.  This is more for me to make sure that I’m keeping on topic.  In short, if I’m writing something and it’s not working and I can’t figure out where it belongs, it’s out.

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Part three of my four part plan will hopefully involve you seeing my blatherations is places other than this blog.  I’m going to see about getting some guest blogging/guest columning/guest commentarying somewhere.  I currently have a few ideas and (I hope) connections.  But if you’re the sort of person who reads my blog and also reads stuff in other places where they discuss things I also talk about feel free to let me know.  If you’re the proprietor of a blog and you think I’d say things that your readers would be interested in, drop me a line.

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Part four of my four part plan…well, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow to see the grand unveiling of that one.

Comments

[Vorjack]

Your are more than welcome to run a guest post(s)at Unreasonable Faith. Hell, you're welcome to become a guest blogger at UF, although your "single life" and "storytelling" posts wouldn't quite fit the theme of the blog.

[Firedrake]

I only started reading this blog when you mentioned it on F-C, so I had missed your battleship posts. Reading now, and I look forward to more in the same vein.

I think there are multiple approaches to blogging. I'm not one of the people who cares about frequent updates - my RSS handler takes care of the polling, so I see a new post even if it's been a year or more since the last one - so I'm more interested in posts that you feel like writing than in posts that are written to satisfy a minimum activity requirement. But that's me, and history shows that catering to my whims will absolutely lose you the mass market.

[Geds]

Vorjack: That would be awesome, thank you. I'll drop you an email later this week and we can discuss. And, um, yeah, I'd definitely stick with the religion/apologetics/history angle over at UF...

Firedrake: I tend to find blogs and follow them no matter how often they update myself. And I've been using RSS feeds more since July. It's to the point where I have feeds set up on one of the computers I use and not the others and I'm starting to get annoyed whenever I'm trying to keep track and I'm not on that one specific laptop. But, by the same token, I have a theory that more posts = people remembering I exist more often no matter how they keep track of me, so that can't be all bad.

[Vorjack]

Sounds good. Use the email from these comments. The general UF email gets clogged with spam these days.

[bluefrog]

Sounds like a plan. I'm glad you decided to keep up the blog, and I hope you get back to Prester John once in a while.