Like Michael Corleone in Godfather II, I tried to get out, but they kept dragging me back in.
I stopped blogging because it was taking over my creative life. When events happened in the news, I found myself wanting to sound off, but I resisted because I did not want to commit to blogging again. I even wrote a post during the Israel-Hezbollah war and posted it, then I deleted it. (I think I will repost it in a few days. It’s old news now, but the principles I discuss are timeless.)
I will try blogging again, but I’m giving myself permission to ignore this blog for long stretches at a time. I need to do that so that my subconscious mind does not have a standing order to think of good blog posts every day. We’ll see how it works out.
During my hiatus I even started a Myspace page because so many of my fellow actors and family members had one. Ironically, I started blogging there on non-political things. Myspace is kind of silly – blogging for dummies, if you will. A friend of mine calls Myspace the devil. If so, then the devil is a probably a vapid teenager who spends his time inviting people to be his friend.
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5 comments:
Your return to blogging is great news! This had become one of my favorite blogs.
Your comment on giving yourself permission not to blog is very perceptive. I have found that it can sometimes be harder to do just that than to force oneself to post "on schedule".
How often to blog is probably the most difficult part to get right, but it sounds like you've found the right balance for your situation. I am glad of that -- and not just because my one of favorite blogs is back!
Thank you, Gus. Your blog is one of my daily reads.
I guess I'm not the first blogger to have problems with time management.
Just remember you don't have to post whole essays every day. You also don't have to post serious stuff all the time. If you want to post some innocuous fluff here, go ahead. It's your blog.
You could easily post the stuff you put on MySpace here. This is YOUR blog, about YOU. If someone doesn't like it, screw 'em.
I did a post sometime ago about my favorite movie villains. It doesn't exactly fall in with the theme of my blog (Politics and Pigskins), but I felt like doing it. It's my blog first and foremost.
Thomas Sowell once said something to the effect that if you don't feel like writing, then don't write. He gave an example of a book he started many years ago, got halfway finished with it, and then stopped. He felt like he didn't have anything further to say on the topic at the moment. He plans to finish it when he has something more to say. His point was that the quality of writing suffers when you write just to fill up the pages.
That said, a blog is quite different from a book or a newspaper column. Some people would say what is the point of having a blog if no one is reading you? If you want to maintain an audience, it is still possible to post something interesting without writing "War and Peace". Post an interesting quote, or a cartoon, or a link to a good editorial, or even just a random thought you had.
Naturally, there will be days when you just don't feel like blogging, or you can't blog because real life gets in the way (darn that job!).
Personally, I don't blog on weekends, unless I have something I REALLY want to blog, which is quite unusual.
But don't think we, your readers, have some quality standard we are holding over your head. We just want to know what you think because we respect your thought processes. Whether those thoughts come out in a sentence or an essay is entirely up to you. ;)
Thanks for the advice, Ed. Anything that is good enough for Thomas Sowell is good enough for me.
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