I just don’t know what to do with this thing.

The fact of the matter is that this blog has gotten a bit boring. Book reviews are all well and good, but wouldn’t you like to see something else on here from time to time? ATC Sundays were fun, then I ran out of ATCs and promptly failed to make any more. Art blogging is very difficult for me anyway because I’m very bad about photographing or scanning things, even when I do manage to actually finish something (which is rare). My primary medium is and always has been language.

I’ve thought about adding some new features here, but I shy away from any kind of schedule because I’m terrible at keeping such commitments and the last thing I want is for this blog to become a chore. That said, I could do recurring themes, assuming no one expects anything to recur with any kind of regularity. Some ideas I’ve had:

  • Hyper-local tourism – that is, posts about places within the city limits of my hometown
  • Movie/television commentary – mostly older stuff as most everything I encounter anymore is via DVD or Netflix Streaming
  • Art experiments – to include playing with assorted art supplies, participation in the occasional art challenge, working through books, that sort of thing

…okay, so I don’t actually have that many ideas. I’m open to suggestions. I already have separate blogs for glue stick tourism, my 101 Things in 1001 Days project, and assorted silly stories from my daily life, so that leaves me unsure with what to do with this, my “main” blog.

Another thing to ponder is post frequency. I was doing really well with the Tuesday/Friday posting schedule but it all ended up being book reviews because I am very bad about doing anything else on any kind of regular basis. I used to just schedule everything for the next available day at noon, meaning I’d often have a string of daily posts and then nothing for weeks. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than the regular twice-a-week gig, especially since the book reviews meant I could get many weeks ahead so every post was kind of a trip down memory lane for me because whatever book that day’s post was about was certain to be something I’d read and reviewed multiple weeks prior. The “daily” posts are more immediate but also far more irregular. Another option is to keep the T/F schedule for book reviews and just post everything else on the next available day as it comes up.

So what do you think? Should I branch out? Should I post more randomly or keep a set schedule? Do you mind the dearth of images on this here blog? Anything in particular you’d like to see more of/at all?

Leave a comment ?

10 Comments.

  1. I would love to see some art experiments!

    • Thanks! I just need to actually take the time to do them, and then to also blog about them. This is difficult when I usually have under 3 hours between getting home from work and going to bed, and my weekends are often full up.

  2. I enjoy the book reviews, despite (because of?) the fact that I am unlikely to ever use them to choose reading material, nor are they about books I’ve already read except on a very rare occasion.

    I would love to see more other stuff, of course, and I think that although your list has only three bullets, all of them are broad enough topics to really widen your options. Another possibility would be to take favorite posts from your LJ and revise/prune/combine them for posting here. I may do that with some LJ blogtoberfest stuff and one or both of my other blogs.

    If the book reviews are kind of onerous, you could drop them to once a week (or just not worry about missing days from time to time). That would give you more freedom in selecting which books to review at all.

    I think keeping the book review schedule (as is or modified) and posting other things as you have them is the way to go. That is, if you want to keep maintaining the blog at all. That’s something none of us can decide for you.

    • Wow, I just went to the archives, and I didn’t realize you are coming up on ten years of this blog. I guess FB stole the linkshares away.

      Anyway, just to say, write whatever the heck you want here. I’ll be happy to read it regardless.

    • Reposting stuff from LJ is a possibility.

      It’s actually quite easy for me to keep up with posting book reviews twice a week (well, it was until my illness kept me from doing basically anything for about a week and a half). The real difficulty I have is finding anything else to post about – and then actually doing it. Most of what I want to post requires media and, as mentioned before, I’m horrible about taking photographs, much less uploading anything.

      I shall think on it further.

      • Maybe you would do better with photos if you didn’t try to take them as soon as you had something to photograph. I take a lot of photos, of course, but I try to be efficient – today I’ll be taking photos of at least three different things, and then they’ll be on my computer and I’ll deal with them gradually. WP makes it so easy to upload – I used to put everything in a particular folder in my webspace and then link to them manually, but now I am more enlightened and use the WP media uploader, which automatically puts a linked image into the post.

        I was thinking, if book reviews are getting boring for you, then variety is good, but there’s no reason to assume they’re boring to other people (or care if they are). Even I look into your book review archive from time to time when some title plinks my memory and I think maybe you reviewed it and that’s why it’s familiar.

        • My issue with photos is manifold. I forget to photograph/scan (and with mailart this is a real problem if it gets sent before I’ve scanned it, or if I’m blogging about something I’ve seen in person, and you can forget about work-in-progress pictures). I take photographs and then never get around to pulling them off my camera/phone. (This happens a lot.) Or I take photographs and forget about them when I want to make the blog post. And finally, a lot of this blog is written during my weekly write-ins on my laptop, and if I don’t have my camera with me, I don’t have access to my photos unless I’ve remembered to dump them to my laptop (rather than my automatically-backed-up desktop) beforehand.

          I like writing book reviews but I want this blog to be more than book reviews, because while I like reading my own book reviews, I personally would not read any blog that was nothing but book reviews. I have no idea if that makes any sense.

          Right now I’m leaning toward the Tues-Fri book review schedule plus other stuff whenever it’s ready to be posted, but I think I’ll wait until I actually have a non-book-review post to make before I start anything back up again.

          • Guess I can’t help with the photo taking – when I started my blog I became tuned toward taking pictures without severe effort. However, if you try to always take them with your phone you’ll always have them at write-ins. It would be a bit of a quality sacrifice, but okay photos are still more photos than none.

  3. :mrgreen:
    How about a regular song and dance number? You are a natural born entertainer.

    Bad puns of the day? One liners that you don’t think are enough for the other blog. Random thoughts of the day, with theme song?

    • Song and dance sounds like something that would require a video camera. I can’t even handle taking photographs, much less uploading anything.

      Bad puns and one liners: that’s what Twitter is for!

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