I’ve never been much of a joiner. I don’t play nice with other children. Well, more them with me, the vicious little bastards. But I’ve joined Constance Wiebrands’s Blogjune project this year anyway. I suspect it was a stupid decision.
“What the fuck did you sign up to that for,” screams my alleged professional side.
“You’ve got leads for paying work you could follow up. But no, you’re pissing away time on things like 5at5. You did an episode of Corrupted Nerds this week, which doesn’t have any income yet, when you’d already been paid to do another episode of The 9pm Edict in May and you only just managed to sneak that in before midnight last night. What’s wrong with you?”
Well, what’s wrong with me could fill a blog post or three on its own, so let’s skip that for now. As for why the fuck I signed up to Blogjune, it’s simply because I miss some of the writing I used to do — the more reflective essays about what was happening in the world, large and small.
I’m talking about things like those listed in Fine posts for 2008 and Fine posts for 2009. Things that were written because they felt right, not because they were something that an editor would pay for.
Looking back through those lists just now, and those for 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013, I’m reminded that there’s plenty to be happy with. Yet somehow the balance still seems wrong.
So my plan for Blogjune — tradition requires that one announces one’s plan for such “challenges”, right? — is to set aside an hour each morning to gather my thoughts from the previous day and turn them into a post.
Sometimes that’ll be an essay like The really real revolutionary revolution of the Internet, or the computational linguistics of Why people who say “train station” sound stupid.
Sometimes it’ll be something much quicker, like Hillary’s mangoes, no NSA involved, which started life as a stream-of-consciousness rant on Twitter, or Six Pigeons for Jeffrey.
It’s also part of my plans to build a more regular structure into my mornings. But I hate those “Hey guys I’m wiping my arse every day now” posts — which are even worse when they’re full of smug machine-generated statistics about how many steps they’ve walked that day or whatever — so I’ll spare you that pain.
What I will say is that part of that daily structure is about closing the feedback loop between the conversations I have on Twitter and elsewhere, and my media production cycle. The aim is to leverage what I’m already doing into something that generates more income — so perhaps my alleged professional side can STFU and wait to see how it turns out.
I see that a whole bunch of people have signed up for Blogjune this year. Whether I get to read all your posts remains to be seen. As I say, I’m not much of a joiner.
[This post is one of 30 I’m doing each day during Blogjune. See them all under the tag blogjune, or subscribe to the RSS feed.]
[Photo: Buddha Brian on a log, a small glass Buddha from Myanmar who was sent to me by ’Pong last month, is seen on a fallen branch at Bunjaree Cottages near Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains, 100km west of Sydney. I’ll be posting an image of Buddha Brian every day this month too.]
The Buddha is made out of quartz. Well, I was told from the guy anyway. 😉
@’Pong: Ah, yes, the fractures inside him look a bit more like quartz than glass. One of the places I used to wander in my early teens had huge boulders of quartz, mostly quartz on the inside, and I’m familiar with its appearance.
In which case he is a lot older than I thought!
I’ll find someone who can check for me. I’m curious now.