When last we left, I was trying to decide what direction I’d be taking this blog in. That was, until I went off about shoveling snow. It’s still snowing, by the way, it’s quite ridiculous how much has been coming down lately.

Anyway, getting back to my brainstorming session on blog usage, I asked myself a few questions to try and get some idea as to what I’d be writing about. I have a few more to consider, one would be: who am I? Obviously, I’m someone who enjoys writing. A lot. It’s one of my many creative outlets and one that has become more prominent lately. I think it’s due mostly to the fact that I haven’t been doing much of it in recent years and I have some future writing projects in mind so I figured this blog would be good practice. It forces me to think about creating a finished product and not just outlines and plot summaries like I’ve been doing lately. These blog posts are very much like essays and writing them gives me an opportunity to start flexing my writing muscles and getting back into form. Committing myself to this project gives me motivation to take responsibility for something and see it through.

In the previous part of this post I asked myself why I write. I explored the reasons behind it but thought of a few more things recently. In a way, writing requires a certain amount of conceit, it’s a little presumptuous to assume there are people out there interested in what I’m thinking. While I don’t think anyone’s out there losing sleep waiting for my next post, I do think there is some interest and it’s reassuring for me to know there’s an audience. Writing is also a way for me to organize my thoughts, it’s therapeutic for me. I put my thoughts out there and feel a sense of satisfaction knowing that others can involve themselves to some extent by reading what I have to say. It’s mutually beneficial: I entertain others and fulfill a need that I have at the same time.

In the last post I did also ask myself what I’d be writing about but didn’t really get specific. So another question to ask myself could be: what are my main subjects of interest? Mostly, they’re hockey, computers/technology, music (listening to it and playing instruments) First Nations culture/art, and probably most of all, complaining. I really enjoy that last one, in fact this could very well become a Festivus with, not just an annual, but weekly or daily airing of grievances.

Given that I have a lot of different things to write about, I need to consider how I’m going to organize everything. There are two solutions I can think of right off the bat: either create separate blogs for separate subjects, or keep everything in this blog and just include tags for posts with similar subjects. I’ve noticed that Tumblr allows for multiple blogs for one user. I could, conceivably, create a separate blog for each major subject: one for hockey, one for computer/tech issues, this one for miscellaneous rambling, etc. Then the problem would be trying to maintain all of them, I have things to say about each but I don’t know if I have enough material to warrant an entire blog for every one of them. Keeping everything here and just attaching different tags for each post might be easier for me as it would allow me time to keep this blog continually updated.

A final question (I do ask myself a lot of questions, don’t I?): how often will I make new posts? It will definitely be an on-going project. Originally I thought I’d be posting frequently to start with, everyday perhaps, but taking a closer look at my schedule I started to rethink that. With starting my own business, having multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts to manage, reading in my leisure time and watching hockey, I don’t really have as much free time to write as I originally anticipated. I imagine I’ll be posting once or twice a week, more if time allows. That post about shoveling snow was somewhat spontaneous and ended up being much longer than I thought it would be, and while it was fun writing it, it did take up a fair amount of my time. I’ve been wanting to finish this post for more than a week now and every time I thought about tackling it, something else would come up and I would get sidetracked.

At this point in time, with everything that I have going on in my life, I’ll probably post once a week. I do have a lot of subjects lined up right now but once those have been addressed, how often I will post will depend on whatever comes to mind at that time.

I’ve certainly given myself a lot of things to think about, this was an interesting exercise for me and we’ll have to see how things turn out. I find myself between a rock and a hard place in thinking about where I’m going to find the time that maintaining this blog on a regular basis will require, but I’ll get it done somehow. I always do.

See you next week sometime. Maybe.