Writing and me

Posted by norwigi on 20 August 2014, 8:54 pm

Welcome back, friends of the grummles!

I want to write more and update this thing more often, so this post will mostly be about exploring why I update so rarely and what I’m going to do to change that. There will be a lot of text and few images, so be warned, ye who reads on!

The first thing I realized when looking through my old drafts is that most of them are focused on events, news and other “time-sensitive” content. The problem with that is that the content is already old by the time I’m ready to publish it. I know it’s common for blog posts to pop up still weeks after the original event they’re about, but for me that feels weird. And if a post feels weird I’m not going to publish it, plain and simple.

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This is an image for you to take a short break from reading. It’s of the Kvasir Games gang from when we were in Malta.

Another thing that makes a post feel weird is the lack of images. Previously, I’ve refused to publish anything that doesn’t have pictures because, personally, I don’t like reading walls of text on the internet. A picture is a good way of breaking the text into smaller chunks and giving the eyes of the reader a small break. Now, I’m no photographer and I rarely take pictures due to the lack of a good camera/phone. A solution to this is to use pictures taken by friends or from the internet, both of which I’ve done in the past.

I think it all comes down to content. Whether it’s dated text or lack of pictures, it’s usually the content that keeps me from posting anything. The observant reader will have noticed that I mentioned my drafts earlier, which means that I do actually still write even if I don’t publish anything. In fact, I’ve written (and deleted) a lot of posts where the content just didn’t feel right, usually because of the aforementioned reasons.

I’ve complained about time in the past, but I don’t think that’s as much of an issue as I often make it out to be. Writing these posts is often something I find myself doing “in between stress”, if that makes sense. It’s a way to me to shut out the outside world for a short while without feeling guilty about wasting time. I’m creating something! The world might never see it, but I am creating something. It’s much like why I have a gazillion and a half folders for game projects lying around in my computer. Writing, however, is different from making games. When writing I don’t feel the need to imagine the result when start, I won’t get interrupted by progress-breaking bugs, I won’t have to stop the process to google something just to get distracted by Facebook, and I don’t feel limited by my own abilities.

This is the point when I realize that I’ve written multiple pages already, covering multiple topics which really should be split into multiple different posts. Brilliant, it’s already working! (Also, I just used the word “multiple” multiple times in a sentence. I did that on purpose.)

But what should I write about? Well, it’s simple: Whatever is on my mind when I feel like writing! I do have a few ideas for topics, and I’m sure there’s more to come along. I can still include relevant news, happenings, events and whatnot, but I don’t have to dedicate a whole post to it. Maybe a “What’s new since last time”-paragraph or similar. (I say that because that’s what I used last time!) To be honest, I just don’t know yet. I’m going to play it out and see what happens.

Something else you might notice, if you’ve read this blog in the past, is the sudden lack of hyperlinks. I started putting them in because I thought it was a fun thing to do but lately it’s become more of a hassle. I might still throw in the occasional link or two, but generally I’m going to assume that anyone capable of reaching this blog also are capable of using Google. (Or Bing, if you’re so inclined.)

I guess that summarizes what I wanted to say quite well. If you’re still reading, then great! Looking forward to seeing again next post. Now, onwards to the section we talked about before:

What’s happened since last time!
Since the last time I wrote anything was in March I’ll probably forget a lot. Let’s start from the top in random order, shall we?

Thanks for reading!