This isn’t a proper content update, which I guess means I’m basically taking the week off. However, that doesn’t mean that I’m not working on the blog, I’ve just decided to change my strategy. Over the last several months, I’ve drifted into an extremely extemporaneous and off-the-cuff style: Though this confers a number of advantages, allowing me to follow whatever idea excites me at the moment and access emotions very directly, it makes it difficult to form cogent and well-researched points that stand up to rigorous scrutiny. It also means I tend to repeat myself a lot, since there are only so many individual ideas which I find particularly interesting within a given span of time. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think, for now, that this approach has run its course, and I’m not getting as much from it any more.
So it’s time to change things up again! Starting now, I’m going back to one content post a week, to be uploaded Monday at 10am. I’ll spend the entire preceding week, each week, writing out that post to go up on Monday, rather than trying to bang it out in the last few hours before I go to sleep the day before. Basically, I want to get to a place where I can spend a relatively restrained and disciplined hour or two each day and develop a piece that’s 1000-2000 words rather than spend 3 or 4 hours twice a week writing two pieces that are 500 words. More than anything else, this let’s me spend one entire day to come up with a topic and outline where I want to go with it, rather than pressure myself to scrape whatever I can find out of my brain and slap it onto the page as quickly as possible. Not only do I believe that the end product will be higher quality and more professional – though I think my recent work has many merits, being professional and well-researched are not among these – I also think this will help me to develop a schedule for writing which is healthier and more creatively sustainable than the half-assed approach I’ve embraced up until now.
I’ll be continuing to post devblog updates once a week, but I’m going to push them back to Saturday, since writing on the main piece should be done on Friday that means that there shouldn’t be much conflict between them. I’ll update the schedule page in a bit, but for now the thing to keep in mind is that Monday at 10am is when each week’s piece goes up, and Saturday at noon is the devblog.
That’s it for this week. Now I need to get to work writing the post to go up next Monday: I hope you’ll all enjoy the fruits of this new approach then!