Day 103: Thoughts on the Future of the Blog

I've been thinking about where I want to take the blog since I passed the 100 day mark, and I've come to the conclusion that I'd like to do some larger pieces. A couple months ago I started moving away from posts with multiple parts, but some of them did pretty well, and I'd like to try that out again. Thing is, those require a lot more effort than the simpler posts I've moved toward. I want to focus on my novel of course, and those bigger posts take up a lot of time. Usually I try not to spend too long writing and editing these because I've always treated it as a warm up that I let myself get carried away with. The longer posts and multi-part posts all develop from a shorter idea that I can't seem to stop writing about. Once I pull at a thread it tends to unravel something bigger and more interesting, so I just keep going. Sometimes I pull on threads that seem to go on forever though, and a lot of my posts I end up cutting short because I really need to work on something else. Upon review, many of them could be a lot more detailed and better thought out than they are, seeing as they tend to read like essays anyway.

Today I started pulling on a thread I'd like to explore, but ended up reading a 60 page master's thesis on the topic, realized I wanted a bunch of visual examples, and that it would probably take more than two days like I normally take to write these, and that oh man, it was going to take forever to get all that compiled into a coherent paper, and suddenly I'm going to have to write pages and pages if I want to say everything I have to say on the topic. Obviously I bit off a little more than I could chew there. The scope of the blog isn't that big, and I have other fish to fry, but I'd still like to be able to write those sorts of posts from time to time. For that reason, I'm going to take a day or two hiatus on posts about once a month, starting with next week. This will give me much more time to get all my thoughts sorted on a big topic before posting all the parts together at once, backfilling the days that were missed. I think this will let me explore bigger topics without feeling like I need to rush to get a post finished so I can edit in the one day I have before it needs to be posted, and it'll make the multi-part posts a lot more coherent than they have been.

Hopefully this is agreeable for any readers out there, and maybe I'll make some short posts talking about what I'm doing during those off days just to make sure to keep the streak going. I'm talking a paragraph or less, because if I let myself go, I'll just keep writing. Look out next week for a couple of days off, and then a bigger post the following Monday. Spoilers, the topic is going to be environmental storytelling, which I have lot to say about.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley