Flipping The Tables For Blaugust

272 words.

I’ve belatedly decided to officially participate in the Blaugust extravaganza. I wasn’t going to because frankly I didn’t think I’d be able to write 31 posts in August. (I still don’t think I will.) But late this past week I stumbled upon some information that I completely missed the first time: You don’t actually have to write 31 posts to participate. I figure that even in my crippled state I should be able to manage five or ten posts.

Of course I’m still going to try to write 31 posts because hyper-competitiveness hehe.

My second reason for jumping in is to field test a new writing process. I’ve become disillusioned with the way my blog is right now. There are maddening technical problems, I’m bored with the format of the posts, and the subjects aren’t that interesting to me. And on top of that, it takes me a long time to write the posts. Classic signs of burnout. So I’m taking this opportunity to “flip the table” so to speak, try something completely different, and see what happens. That’s my primary goal for this Blaugust.

Whenever I approach a writing challenge like this, I try to set a goal that’s above and beyond just “finishing.” Otherwise it’s likely to end in disappointment for me. I learned that from NaNoWriMo a long time ago.

With any luck, you, the reader, won’t notice anything except shorter posts, somewhere in the area of 300 words or less. I will likely abandon images, too, as that is a big time sink for me. Cutting down the production time as much as possible is a primary goal.

Related

This page is a static archival copy of what was originally a WordPress post. It was converted from HTML to Markdown format before being built by Hugo. There may be formatting problems that I haven't addressed yet. There may be problems with missing or mangled images that I haven't fixed yet. There may have been comments on the original post, which I have archived, but I haven't quite worked out how to show them on the new site.

Archived Comments

Atheren 2018-07-29T15:17:09Z Cheers! And welcome to official Blaugusting. There’s the thing: when I read other people’s posts, I like anything they write, whether short or long because the subject of games is endlessly fascinating.

Bhagpuss 2018-07-29T18:47:59Z

I’ve been trying to learn the trick of keeping posts down to 250-300 for years now, without any noticeable success. When I look back at my early blogs, the first year or two, most of my posts were relatively short but somewhere along the line I started writing 1000 word essays and it went from there. Today’s post, for example, which is quite brisk by my standards, is 960 words. The “cheese” one is 1568. About the only blogger I can think of who routinely writes longer posts than me is Jeromai.

I’m hoping that Blaugust will get me to cut back and post some short stuff but I wouldn’t count on it.

Jeromai 2018-07-30T04:39:10Z

I have tried shorter posts. It really doesn’t take. Wall of texts just demand emergence. I figure it helps me trim the nonserious readers naturally so that they never ever find the comment section, leaving me to enjoy the company of likeminded souls who care to comment. ;)

Frequency-wise though, I’m probably aiming for the low modest target of 5 or 10 this month too, to not add extra stress in my life. We’ll see. The nice thing about Blaugust is that reading other peoples’ blogs really helps to create ideas to riff off and prompts more posts.

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