Endgame Viable

Morning! I’m back from an early morning “simulation CT” appointment where the radiology folks mapped out the pelvic bone they’re going to zap with radiation. They said it would be 2-3 weeks to get on the schedule for that. It was really quick and easy, and most of my time was spent driving there and back.

Otherwise, I wanted to address a comment Bhagpuss left on my last post that I pretty much agree with. (Sadly I can’t link directly to my comments. Maybe someday.) The key part was:

“if it’s not fun any more, just stop”

I agree. With each passing day, I’m approaching the point of just stopping Blaugust.

I was in a nice comfortable blogging pattern and now I’m outside my comfort zone and wondering what it’s all for. Can I keep doing Blaugust? Sure. I still have the organizational skills to pull off a post every day. But do I want to? Um… not especially?

I wanted to make a tribute to Belghast by writing something every morning, and I’ve learned that Belghast was even more superhuman than I realized, because that is hard.

I wanted to try something new this Blaugust, which I did, and it was hard.

Mainly because it doesn’t really fit my writing style.

My normal writing pattern is to go about my day, have a thought at some random time, turn to my laptop and write down a few paragraphs about it, then return to my day while the idea continues to percolate in the back of my head. Periodically I’ll return to my laptop and type a bit more about whatever the thought was, and over the course of many days or even weeks I’ll have something that might be a complete thought.

It’s not a great way to write if you want to make a living at writing, but it’s a pretty low-impact method for me.

I’m not going to give up on Blaugust just yet, but I’m going to adjust my method and see if I can move back toward my comfort zone. I definitely don’t want to experience a big letdown at the end of Blaugust.

I’ll go back to jotting down paragraphs at random times during the day. (Honestly I’ve been doing that all along anyway: Right now there are four short drafts over in the file explorer sidebar I’ve made since August 1st, and another document of about seven topic bullet points.)

The daily plan now is, instead of sitting down to write something every morning, I’ll sit down and review those fragments and find something I can touch up and post quickly. And it may or may not actually be in the morning, it might be later in the afternoon, or after the work day.

But if I don’t find something… that’s where the big question mark is. Will I give up for the day? All unknown. Weekends are also a question mark. I definitely prefer to write during the week, and not so much on weekends.

Luckily, since there’s a firehose of blog posts flying out there in Blaugust-land, it’s not too hard to find a topic to riff on.

Incidentally, I’ve drafted Obsidian as the location where I jot down fragments of posts. I haven’t really done that before. Usually they accumulate as files inside my Hugo repo that sometimes get committed and sometimes don’t.

After Blaugust, I also want to try to adjust my Recluse Reports, so I have that in the back of my mind too. Instead of one big post with many different topic sections, I want to try to make each section its own relatively small post. I haven’t come up with a workflow for that yet. I’ll probably be using the rest of Blaugust to experiment on that.

The key for me is finding a low-impact workflow. Bhagpuss mentioned it can take him 3 hours to write a post. It’s not unusual for it to take that long for me, too, and I don’t really want to spend that much time on blogging.

I’m aiming more for the range of a half hour to sit down, read over and polish a draft from the queue, add the metadata and an image, and publish it.

Most of this post, for example, was written yesterday afternoon.

P.S. For anyone else publishing their posts by committing Markdown files to a git repo, I added a pre-commit hook that checks to make sure I remembered to add all the appropriate Blaugust metadata on these posts, and it just saved me some embarrassment because I definitely forgot them today.