Hi.
After years of unsuccessfully trying to start a personal blog, I made it a point to start one — and hopefully stick with it — in 2011 as one as my resolutions. My failed blogs never really had themes other than randomness so I never really had focus or initiative. Although I plan on writing about all things I encounter on a daily basis, I do think I have a theme this time that will make it stick.
The theme: Music or misery?
But before I explain what that means, let me go into why I am committed to sticking to blogging this time:
1) My Writing Skills Are Admittedly Deteriorating(!) – In junior high I was convinced I’d be a writer someday. Back when I lived in West Virginia, I actually placed 2nd in a statewide essay contest in the 7th grade and thought it would be my career path. I was so sure I would become a writer until I got to high school and was hit with a reality check when I learned my writing skills weren’t all they were thought to be.
In college, I went full throttle with the movie site I started during my free periods in high school (which was more of a blog back then before blogs were called blogs) and I wrote stuff on a daily basis. I finally got myself getting into a rhythm and as the years went on, my writing improved. I frequently wrote about films and my thoughts about them and by the time I left college, I felt like my writing was pretty good. Not great, but as best as I thought it would ever be.
Fast forward to the present day where I have pretty much abandoned my weekly musings about film and where any creative writing at my job is usually done by one of the freelancers working for me. The only creative writing I ever do now is on Twitter and the ADD nature of it has me thinking in 140 characters. (Example: It’s literally taken me hours to figure out how to put together this post. Not good.)
It’s finally become clear to me that the old adage my junior high and high school teachers taught me is true: Writing is like a muscle you need to constantly exercise. And because I work for a company now where writing and content is becoming important, even though I’m not actually doing a lot of the writing, I to get back on that treadmill.
2) I MISS it – I miss having a platform of being able to speak my mind freely and while Twitter allows me to have that somewhat, it’s not enough. I’m often trying to condense thoughts into terse sentences or clogging up people’s Twitter feeds and usually end them feeling incredibly unsatisfied.
3) Seems to be the “thing to do” these days - Through my connections in social media, I’ve met many of you who have your own blogs and I got to admit, it’s gotten to a point where I feel left out about not having something to call my own. It’s weird because I DID have a successful “blog” (again, it wasn’t technically a blog since the term wasn’t invented back in the day) at one point where I was getting upwards to about 20,000-30,000 readers a day but I abandoned that daily habit right when the blogging revolution happened around 2004 and 2005. I’ve met a lot of you who have done some cool stuff with your own sites and while I don’t foresee this blog to have any kind of substantial success or readership, it’ll be nice to have something to call my own again. I feel like it’s something I need to have if I’m going to keep up in this crazy age of content production.
So there you have it. And look, I’ve written my first personal post in years. Now I’m going to go reward myself with a brownie before watching a few episodes of Parks and Recreation and go to bed. It admittedly wasn’t that painful — why has this taken me so long?