Critique my blog! Go on! Go for it! It’s my birthday on Sunday, so even if you say something completely spirit crushing there’s a good chance I won’t see it until Monday, and Mondays are fundamentally spirit crushing anyway. Help make me a better blogger, it’ll be a nice present…
Blogging can be hard work. Not in the same way that digging holes is hard work, but nevertheless, there’s a lot of effort involved – coming up with inspiration, turning that into something coherent, remembering how to spell words like ‘coherent’. Add to that the dark, crushing realisation that around half your readers are Russian spambots, and it’s amazing any blogs ever get written.
(The easiest way to help your favourite blogger to overcome this is to leave comments and hit the ‘Like’ button. Russian spambots don’t do that, at least not legibly.)
All which is just preamble to me passing on my thanks to Heather over at HeatherBlog for nominating me for a Versatile Blogger Award. It genuinely means a lot, especially as it comes from a better writer than me. It’s been a long time since I got nomimated for anything related to my writing (the last time was at High School – I misunderstood the comptetion’s submission guidance and so was forced to enter something I’d written out-of-spec, much to the disgust of my teacher. Of course, the Universal Law Of Irony meant that I was the only person in school who actually won anything).
However, a Versatile Blogger nomination carries with it responsibility. Firstly you have the opportunity to nominate some of your own favourite bloggers, which I’ll do in due course. Then you have to list seven interesting facts about yourself.
This is a lot easier if you actually have seven interesting facts:
1. I can recite much of Transformers: The Movie off by heart. And when I say ‘can’, I mean ‘do’.
2. Talking of movies, I cry at them, especially The Iron Giant and Finding Neverland. I also believe that Steve McQueen will one day make it over that fence in The Great Escape, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
3. My favourite city is Toronto. I promise to take my fiancee there one day.
4. My favourite song is Thunder Road, but my favourite hymn is Be Thou My Vision.
5. I’m not a good driver.
6. My karaoke song is Born to Run.
7. I almost quit this blog a couple of months ago because I didn’t think it would achieve critical mass. I’m glad I didn’t, and I guess that’s the moral of this post; don’t give up and never forget to give encouragement whenever you can. You never know when it’s really, really needed…
So I’m suffering a case of blogger’s block again. Never fear – I have a plan! Thanks to my fancy new smartphone I’m carrying around a good chunk of my music collection, and therefore I can use the song titles as inspiration. Genius, right?! Let’s go!
Hits Shuffle.
JCB Song
So. JCBs. They’re big. Big and yellow. Big, yellow and noisy. Yes.
Crickets chirp, hits Shuffle again.
The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight
Okay. The sidewinder is a… Is it a missile? I think it’s a missile. Either that or a minor Transformer. Let me check… No, it’s a snake or a plane. Snake on a plane?
Hits Shuffle again, in an attempt to hide his ignorance
Birdhouse in your Soul
This is an awesome song. Possibly about the ineffable nature of the human soul. Or maybe a birdhouse.
Hits Shuffle, hoping for something easier.
Jump
Hits Shuffle without even trying.
The Rising
Okay, this would be great if it wasn’t the basis for a post on the 10th anniversary of September 11. Next!
Hits Shuffle. Repeatedly.
Anyway You Want It
Well, I’ve been singing for five minutes but I haven’t actually written anything. This ain’t getting my blig blogged.
Wait, blig blogged? What does that even mean?! Stupid typos typed on stupid elfen iphone keypads with stupid sausage fingers…
Tries to hit Shuffle, misses, tries again.
The Group Who Couldn’t Say
I’m sitting here, an uninspired, sausage-fingered, musically illiterate, failed blogger, and now my iPod thinks I’m in the mood for abstract. Great. Because what you really want on a Wednesday is an enigma.
Hits Shuffle for the last time. This has to be the moment of truth. Gimme some sugar baby!
Salty Dog
I give up.
Hits Kindle app; battery runs ou
This blog is getting old.
Between Livejournal and WordPress it’s been around since the back end of 2005. I suspect blogs age like dogs, and therefore this place is about 112 in human years. Thing is, now I’m having a crisis of confidence.
Don’t get me wrong, I love blogging (or at least the reading/writing part of it, less so the SEO side of things), but I’m now getting fairly convinced that I’m not going to achieve any critical mass with it. And I’ll confess to the sins of pride and envy; I want to be read. Every blogger does, it’s why we do it.
Of course, people do read my stuff, and believe me, it’s appreciated. I guess I just got a bit depressed when I looked at my stats and realised the bulk of them were robots from Russia.
I’m also having a bit of a creative block, which isn’t quite the same as writer’s block. I know why this is – I’m not reading enough, and you can’t be a good writer without reading – books, comics, magazine articles, other blogs, liner notes, whatever. Why aren’t I reading? Well, a) Twitter addiction, and b) looking at my blog statistics and being taunted by the aforementioned spambots. And given that the Twitter thing is at least partly motivated by getting ideas for the blog, I think I can diagnose my problem – I’ve become so caught up with the business of blogging that I’ve lost sight of the important stuff – the writing, reading, commenting, learning, communing.
(Search Engine Optimisation is like the One Ring, shiny and tempting and dangerous, and so every now and then you need a couple of short dudes to metaphorically throw your computer into a volcano, releasing you from its thrall.)
I know this sounds like I’m about to quit, but I’m not – at least I don’t think I am. I get comments saying they like what I write and that keeps me going. Sometimes it feels like a bit of a struggle though, and that’s not how it should be.
(I’m also aware that describing blogging as an occasional struggle should invite ridicule from anyone who’s going through a really tough time at the moment, blogging from a warzone or revolution or something. But you know what I mean.)
So how do you do it? How do you keep the creative juices flowing? How do you avoid the sparkling lure of your analytics page? How, how, how?!
I’m part of the two blog carnivals, the Carnival of Cities and the Carnival of Storytelling. Check them out!
