I have no notes from my meetup in New York with the friendly WordPress bloggers there, but I will get to writing about it eventually. There’s a topic I need to dance lightly around first.
This site has always been my own ramblings and unfocused entries. This isn’t likely to change. What I do need to adjust is what I care about and how it affects what I write.
I started this site to dump my writing onto. A few days ago, I wrote something about the potato people living under my front porch - a short work of fiction - and got many messages from people wondering if I had gone crazy. Well that’s really what the site is supposed to be, you know? Writing. Of whatever quality and substance.
I also stopped using my own home-grown blog/CMS software because I was spending more time maintaining it than I was writing. Ironically, I became very involved in WordPress development after switching. While I see it necessary to write about things that matter to me - blogging being one of those things - I really should concentrate on what I love about what I write, even if I’m writing about something that I hate. Perhaps I should focus on those things on my own, rather than worry about what other people are writing.
It does bother me sometimes that I’ll take on a topic, write about it, but don’t follow-through with it. Then I’ll come to find that a bunch of other people (who I know read this site) take that idea and expand on it but never bother to mention that I might have been a seed for their own work.
Sure, I wouldn’t mind credit, but that’s not even it. I marvel at what a large body of work I’ve influenced. Individually, it’s nothing. Amassed, it’s disturbing. I think that focusing what I’m doing here will be helpful with preventing that. That is to say, if I follow-through, then why would anyone else bother?
In addition to all of that, I’ve got a project that I’m dying to talk about, but it’s not nearly ready enough yet. The problem isn’t so much that I want to reveal pre-release details, just that if I’m not working on it, I’m probably sleeping. It’s all-consuming, and it’s difficult to talk about much else. Finding conspirators in daily life is difficult, and I think Berta is probably sick of hearing about it already. But since it’s conuming most of my thoughts, it’s difficult to concoct a post about much else.
Aubrey writes about not caring what other people think about your writing. I agree. I shouldn’t care. I should write what I enjoy.
Spelling it out now, I wonder why it was ever not this obvious.
