I am understanding what are my hangups when it comes to sitting down and turning imagined plots and characters into words on the screen. My main roadblock was trying to edit while writing.
Editing while writing doesn’t work for this writer and I found myself so focused on grammatical errors and attending to the annoying red underlined words that the thoughts got lost before I had a chance to type them.
So, I went back old school.
I went back to writing in a notebook. This pulls my attention away from editing while writing and I am not worried about getting everything perfect as it comes out of my head. While I am writing, prefection doesn’t exist for me, instead it is about developing thoughts and putting what’s in my head down in a coherent way.
Now, I will say that having to go back and decipher my hand writing and then type everything into a word doc is a tad bit annoying but this has proven to be very effective to me and my writing that I don’t intend to give it up anytime soon.
Let me know your thoughts and what has been some hangups that you as a writer have had to overcome.
Blogging begins with me sitting, standing or walking around my house thinking about posting then I sit in front of my laptop and begin banging on the keys. The cats think I’m mad.
Managing one blog initially seemed like a good idea; simple enough, right? Or so it seemed.
It was 2016, I was jobless, depressed, and looking for an outlet. I created an outlet and started a blog to tackle issues that affected female blerds (black nerds).
I posted once and let the blog sit in cyber land for over 3 years. I always had this nagging feeling that I had quit something that was very important to me. But old habits die extremely hard and in dramatic fashion, I made excuses, and choked it up to life happening. When I became employed, my job became my focus. Once again posting and blogging became something only big time influencers and people that didn’t have “real” jobs did.
Then something changed, I started this journey when I hit the magical twenty-seven (magically for me at least). I re-visted my blog and posted a followup to the original post.
Then another idea hit me, this is my outlet right? Then use it for its intended purpose so, I started chronicling my journey and some of my struggles with the intention that someone would read and find either some comfort or strength in my words.
I wanted other women to know they were not alone.
Now, managing two sites I must say is a challenge but it is one that I enjoy. My blogs are important, but they are not without their challenges.
Posting
The goal or the purpose of having a blog is to post and to post frequently. That means creating a schedule and most importantly sticking to it. This is something I have been struggling with but I like to think that I am improving upon.
One way I am overcoming this slack in posting is to use my handy-dandy planner and to actually use it in a purposeful and meaningful way. Although buying the stickers and putting together my weekly layouts are quite enjoyable!
Content
Next struggle, what does one post about?
How real do you want to get when potentially 10s, 100s or possibly even 1000s of people that have no idea who you are will read your words? Well, that is something the blogger will have to decide. I like to be authentic but I post on both blogs with the understanding that I have a day job.
What I post online has consequences however big or small. I like to keep it simple when I post and I have a rule. I will not post anything that I cannot defend or that I would be embarrassed or apprehensive to repeat to anyone face to face.
So, dear reader, do you blog? Or have your own site? If so, what are some challenges that you have overcome or overcoming? Do you find blogging to be easy, fun, fulfilling?
Time. No one has enough of it, not in a day, a week, a month or a year. Where does it go and most importantly can one get it back?
I would often sit around and wonder, ‘my God, I am almost thirty boy where did those carefree afternoons spent relishing in doing absolutely nothing, the long summers that never seemed to end and the smell of soul food coming from Granny’s kitchen go?’
Before I realized Life is what you make of it and that only I can rescue myself, I was pass the point of young adulthood and settling into Adulthood, where things aren’t so simple.
It was starting around twenty-eight, when the heavy questions started to gnaw at me. Do you want children? Do you want to get married? Do you see yourself working here for the long term? What’s your endgame?
I had no answer because I had never thought of those questions because I felt, back then, that I had all of the time in the world.
Now, I am in a constant state of panic; frustrated that things aren’t happening fast enough or that those things should have happened sooner. Why wasn’t I more focused and disciplined? Why didn’t I have more fun? Why did I play it so safe all of the time?
It goes back to before, I thought I had all of the time in the world. Now, I understand that standing still will not slow it down it will keep going the clock will keep ticking.
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