Monday, November 5, 2012

Having a phat chat with my blog


I’ve been fairly absent on this blog. When I do blog, they’re half-arsed posts with no significance. When I publish them, I just want to remove them straight away because I’m embarrassed by the lack of effort I’ve put into the post and the terrible quality of my photos. I think the only post I’m remotely proud of is the last one, and that’s because I really liked how the photos turned out and I had so much fun grading the colours. However, content-wise, it feels a bit vapid.

I’ve started volunteering my reviewing “skillz” to artsHub this year. I had lots of fun at first, but I became so daunted by my opinion being “wrong” (which is silly because opinions are supposed to be neither right or wrong) or my writing style is crap that I started writing less and less, which has extended to blogging less as well. I think it’s just been a mixture of very low confidence in my skills, fluctuating emotions due to many quarter century crises, intense self-deprecation and the inability to find inspiration.

I’ve recently started reading singer/songwriter Rose Wintergreen’s blog. It’s chock full of great tips on how to improve general web presence and how to inspire creativity and productivity, and contains personal insights on her creative process. I feel so much better after reading her blog; I feel more motivated about writing in general.

One of her blog posts mentioned how knowing why we are blogging can help us stay motivated and focused. She asked us to answer three questions about our blogs: Why do we want to blog? What do we write about and who are we blogging for?

I thought this would be a good exercise for me to put all this stuff in perspective, give me and my blog a bit of direction. Here goes:

Why do I blog?


I blog to help me improve my writing and photography. I’d also like to be a part of the online blogging community and make some blogging friends.

What do I write about?
I want to write reviews of films, TV, music and food with a good measure of reflection on the creative process, my life and share travel stories. I’d like to eventually extend this to opinion pieces about topical issues.

Who do I write for?

This one is tricky. I write for myself but also for people who might be interested in the topics I’m interested in such as film, TV, food, music and creativity.

I'm sure my answers to these questions will change next month, but at the moment, I think I'm in a good space.

How do you stay focused with your blog? 

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