Topical blog versus personal blog, I’m going with a personal blog.

Taking a full month off of blogging really got me out of the habit of writing. I didn’t write much of anything. So now it feels like starting over. I might as will write this first entry and the next one will be easier. I’m going to return to the original purpose of this blog in that this is practice writing. Once I week I’ll write, and unlike before not worry too much about view count or building up a popular blog. It’s practice, I can be creative with it with photos and videos, but there is no need to take it that seriously.  Writing is a serious ambition of mine, but a blog is not the way to pursue getting published without a lot of time and work.

I had a skateboarding topic to write about tonight, but that can wait until next week.  After writing my intro paragraph, it looks like I simply need to write about my blog a little bit. Over the past year, my blog improved quite a bit. The writing was better, and more on topics as opposed to my personal experience, and I posted regularly. I believe from September to May I posted once a week or more. I started to get comments, and my two classes I took at Gotham Writers helped out my writing.

When I posted blog entries I’d link them to facebook, and email my family. I’d check the view count stats daily, and I wanted to build something up. The challenge though when trying to write weekly or more, you have to be able to think of topics. My general rule was never to post my fiction on my blog, because eventually I could send that out.  Topic writing is a different beast, and can be done easier for me. But posting regularly you have to rack your brain on what to write sometimes. Over that year I wrote about skateboarding, reviewed books, talked about librarianship issues, and several other random topics. Now I’m convinced a successful blog has to be topical, on one thing. To reach for the stars I would need to have solely a skateboarding blog, solely a book review blog, or solely a librarianship blog. Putting all of ones interests randomly into the same site stamps it as a personal blog. That was the problem my blog focused too much on myself instead of on a certain topic. Another point is that popular blogs post hyper regularly, perhaps even daily, which I don’t have the time to do.

I’m glad that there are blog successes out there, but from my browsing it is a lot of laymen claiming expertise on a topic. If you know so much about books, why are your reviews not in a magazine or on a popular website? I’m a fan of skateboarding, and I enjoy reading books. But there are people out there in those industries that are the experts.  I feel if I make a topical blog on one of my interests, I’m claiming an expertise over other fans. Librarianship I could write with some authority and experience, but I prefer not to except in the big picture or for advocacy.  So much of my work involves other people that I don’t think it’s right for me to write up on it regularly.

So that leaves the other main interests in my life; skateboarding, writing, and literature. I’m not going to limit my blog to those and claim expertise on them. I’d rather my entries on those topics be of as a fan and not an authority. So basically I’m going to write a personal blog and I am now okay with that. My goal is to write an entry once a week without expectations of high view counts or online success.