Three years of inane rambling
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It's odd to think that at the end of the month, my blog website will be three years old. Something I originally decided to do just to keep myself motivated when it came to writing seems to have lasted far longer than I expected. That basically means I have a website full of three years' worth of inane rambling that is of no use to anybody. By that logic, I could be a politician… that is if my policies involved having a poor grasp of geography, avoiding zombies, being followed by people who talk to themselves and observing strange dance floor behaviour at weddings.
So, what have I learned in the last three years? Simple. I've learned that writing two blogs a month, every single month, is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Even coming up with a topic to write about can often be challenging. And if I do manage that, I then have to figure out a way to write five hundred words about it. It's no mean feat.
So, do I regret starting it? Not really. As I said above, the purpose of setting the site up was to give me a reason to write as regularly as possible. In that sense, it's been a success. Some blogs are later than others, but I've managed to hit my targets almost every single month since I started—with just a couple of exceptions. It's also given me the motivation to write outside of the blog. For example, just a few months ago, I completed a yearlong creative writing course, and around that I've been attempting to write other things too.
My biggest problem is free time. It seems somewhat elusive these days. I keep finding myself busy with other things. And often when I do have 'free' time, I'm in no fit state to do anything anywhere near as productive as I'd like. So many projects I'd love to finish have either been ongoing for far longer than I'd like or are simply on hold. I even struggle to remember having time to start them.
In spite of everything else, the blog site has persisted. It's the one thing I feel obliged to maintain every month. Perhaps it's the added incentive that, unlike many of my other projects, it actually receives an audience. I don't believe for a second that any of its readers, regular or otherwise, would lament its passing were I to stop blogging, but that the articles get read at all is motivation enough for me to keep doing it, and at the end of the day that motivation is all I'm looking for, however it comes.
For that reason, I hope the site will still be going in another year—and beyond that with any luck too. At the moment, I'm toying with the idea of a re-design for the website itself (inspired by my new job as a Web Developer). Perhaps a facelift will provide some suitable inspiration. In the meantime, however, I'll have to keep coming up with topics the hard way. Any suggestions are always welcome.