Absent Posts

I've been asked before why I don't write about certain things here on this blog, I even dedicated a post to explaining some of the reasons why I choose not to.  There is another reason why I don't write about certain things though and it's rather more practical than any personal misgivings, quite simply, some things aren't "juicy" enough to be able to write about in any great depth.  I need something I can sink my teeth into and really think about for me to be able to write something of a decent length with any level of coherence.

In English class my teacher once said to us that you often have to write a skeleton first and then go back and add the keek.  That word might be new to some people, it's a slang word from Northern Ireland that basically means shit.  I find the fact that the word also exists as slang for many different things in other countries to be rather amusing.  In some countries it means something very good, and there's even a social network named after that term, regardless the colloquialism remains.  What my English teacher was trying to tell us was that you write the core story line and progress the plot first, and then go back later to add in the detail and fill it out.  Most stories you read can be gutted quite substantially and still maintain their core narrative, there are even abridged versions of some classics that attempt to do just that.

I set myself a target word count for posts I create on this blog.  It was initially 500 words per post +/- 250, but I later increased that to 1,000 words +/- 250 again to give myself some room for manoeuvre.  That word count has felt much more appropriate and I have been able to cover quite a lot of topics in the level of detail that I feel strikes a balance between too much and too little to make it just right.  As I've said before there are some things I could write a 10,000 word dissertation on with relative ease, and still have much more that I want to write about.  There are other topics however where my thoughts are very limited in reference to the subject.  These are usually things that either I don't know much about or I feel are simple concepts that are self evident and don't require much explanation.

In the case of topics where I don't know much about them to begin with, sometimes I will do some research and my interest grows to a point where I have enough ideas to be able to write something of reasonable length that has something I want to say, but at other times, either before doing any research or even after doing some initially, I realise it's not something I really care about.  If I don't care about it then I'm not going to write about it.  That doesn't mean that I won't consider ideas that other people mention to me in passing, it just means that it either hasn't occurred to me or it's really just something I know of but never spent much time thinking about.

I do recognise that there is a desire to know what people think about many things, there will always be something that someone will think about and they'll want to know if they are alone in their thoughts or if others agree with them.  As flattering as I find it when people want me to be the one to lead those conversations I do have to say it's not very difficult to start a blog, the two easiest platforms to use are Blogger and Wordpress, the former is run and hosted by Google for free, and the latter you can either download for free and install on a server of your own, or you can get a hosted version at Wordpress.com, the latter of which despite first impressions does actually have a free variant you can use if you want, so either way you can do it at no monetary cost to yourself.  You don't even have to know about coding, HTML or anything like that, these platforms are Content Management Systems, if you can use GMail to send emails then you'll be fine with Blogger's interface it's not that much different.  There are templates and styles you can choose from too so you never have to deal with anything nitty gritty under the hood if you don't want to.

I would encourage anyone who has been inspired by anything I have written to consider starting their own blog and start putting their own ideas out there into the Universe.  You would be surprised by some of the feedback you will get from people.  I have been writing blogs for years now, this blog is one of many different iterations that have come and gone as I try something new each time.  Every time I always find that someone will find an interest in what you write, and it is often the posts you think no-one would be interested in reading at all that turn out to do the best.  There can be negative responses, but those are a minority, and most platforms offer you a way to block or moderate content, you can turn comments off entirely through Blogger for example, or set them to require approval before they are posted.  You can choose how much you want to expose yourself to the world, but I would say, the more avenues you open up for positivity to reach you, the more you get in return when you send it out into the world.