Blogging In A Time Of Crisis

Blogging About Blogging

 
Monthly State of the Blog [Archives].
~~~
We can wonder about the worth of the endeavor, given the state of the world. I have come down on the side of continuing, for good or ill.

Obsessing About The Blog
I have been obsessed with the blog since lock-down began. Well, I’ve always been a bit obsessed. You can’t have a daily blog for eight years without a touch of obsession. Lately, it has increased.

I have a pleasant fantasy that the blog takes me an hour a day, Monday through Friday. That was not true before. It’s not even close now.

I often get out ahead of skis, working on posts for the following week. Does this mean I use the free time for gainful activity? Not in the slightest. Let’s say Monday arrives with posts written and scheduled through Thursday. Do I go off to attack the endless to-do list that is house and barn ownership? Nope. I spend twice as long on posts for the weekend.

Is this a good use of a large part of my day? No idea. I’m not sure how to weigh merit. I am sure that I don’t have the energy for philosophical debate. I’m simply doing what holds my attention at the moment.

After the firestorm of motivation that is the blog, I do nothing. Limited housework. No work marketing, no organizing of my life, no hobbies that loom patiently in the corner of the living room. I often can’t muster the concentration to read. I’ll pick up a book, look at a few pages, wander off.

So that’s my schedule: blog, bike for exercise, horses, stare into space. Even the horse activity is low key. If we had the right horses and access, I’ll be strolling down the trail as often as possible. As is, there’s a lot of practicing our statue maneuver or meandering about the ring.

Why this devotion to the blog? A call to entertain? A diversion? A time sink? A chance to figure out where my own head is at? All of the above? No idea. If you’ll excuse me, I need to get busy finishing the rest of this post.

Obsessing, But Not Remembering
One the things I have been obsessing about is what a friend calls “evergreens.” Posts not connected to a particular time or place that can held in reserve and used as needed [Green Horses].

I have finished my current list of evergreens. Now, I have 8 in reserve: 2 text, 6 image, 2 Sunday. Some, I definitely want to use at some point, mostly those which people have been kind enough to send me. Other posts may never see the light of day, unless I get truly desperate. This much emergency rations makes me a little nervous. As if having back-up will call into existence a reason for needing it. I am trying to see it as a gift to my future self, and/or to remember that being called away could be a good thing, as when I had to drop everything to get Milton in Kentucky [Delay Of Game, Shipping].

The last one on my evergreen to-do list was a life hack about a safety can opener, on the theory that horse people have cats and dogs. This one took a while. I already had the text, from an email recommending one to a friend. I needed better photos. I wanted to get the unit after it had been cleaned in the dishwasher but before it was used for dinner. It took a while for conditions to line up. Finally, I achieved lovely pictures of the sparkling clean can opener in golden-hour light. Magnifco.

Then, my phone died. Before I had downloaded the photos.

A few days later, I wondered if perhaps I had emailed them to my desktop and forgot.

I searched.

I found the a notification for a post from 2014, [Life Hacks: Can Opener].

I have no memory of this.

All this time. All this effort. Not the faintest clue that I had done this before.

Would I have remembered had the world not been off kilter? Or have I written more blog posts than my recall buffer can handle?

Obsessing, But Not About Horses
Weekends have been off topic for a while [Fiction]. Lately, I have added posts about my exercise choices [Will Walk For Bling], about my thoughts on life [Minor Inconveniences], even my mailing habits [If We Can’t Travel, At Least Our Postcards Can]. Some weeks are more off-topic than on.

I can’t bring myself to care.

I’m typing what I want to type. Maybe because of the pandemic, maybe because I am slowly – or not so slowly – turning into a curmudgeon.

Partly, a dearth of gripping content. I talked about this before [Meanwhile]. Slow, steady progress is not the stuff of legend. We walked. Rodney was relaxed. Yay. Lack of progress is even less riveting. Milton and I continue to circle each other warily. Boo.

Partly, I have gone completely off the rails on driving traffic to the blog. I’ve stopped posting to blog Instagram and Facebook accounts. Not splitting my focus [Contests]. Triaging efforts that were not wildly, or even mildly, successful. Stop trying to entice people to read the blog. I have lost all grip on targeted audience engagement. I didn’t do much before [Attitude Check]. Even less so now.

You found it. Maybe other folks will. Awesome. Meanwhile, I need to come up with an idea for next Friday.

Stay safe. Stay sane.
Katherine Walcott