Too Many Words

So that was a long gap between posts. I suspect things are going to get oddly sporadic, random even, now I'm back at work. Having dropped a day to go to three days a week and also requested, if possible, the three days don't come all at once, I now have a pattern that's sufficiently scattered I can't readily hold it in mind. 

I can't say being back at work is a joy but it does at least provide a little outside perspective after six months sat at home in front of a screen. And a keyboard.

One of the many recurring tasks the job involves is writing those little cards you see that sit on the shelves to draw attention to certain titles. The latest guidance suggests they should never be more than twenty-five words long. After I saw that I went around and did a word count of a few of mine (and other peoples'). Almost all of them were longer than that. The only reason they weren't a lot longer was you couldn't fit any more words on the cards.

I'm going to try to stick to the advised word-count on any new ones I write in the hope I might develop some transferrable skills. If I could train myself to be concise I might be able to knock out a blog post in under an hour, which would mean I could reasonably expect to get something up whether I'd worked that day or not.

Shorter, snappier posting has been a goal of mine for years. It's not like I don't know how. It's more like I've forgotten. Looking back at the early days, pretty much every post comes in under five hundred words, some at half that. Re-reading them now, they don't seem to lose much for being so very, very much shorter. 

The posts get progressively longer and longer over the years until these days I don't consider I've scratched the surface of anything in much under two and a half thousand words. I discard entire ideas for posts nowadays (and not infrequently either) because as I frame them in my mind I can feel them running to five thousand words or more. 

I wanted to do one in reply to Aywren's post on the importance of story in mmorpgs but just the thought of doing justice to the subject made me feel tired. I couldn't see how I could get it done in less than a couple of days of solid work. 

The reason I did a music post on Friday, due to an unfortunate piece of scheduling the one day in five I wasn't working, was that music posts are relaxing and fun to do. They take even longer to put together than regular posts but well over half of it is watching videos and listening to songs so it hardly counts. 

And the way I write music posts feels different. They're almost always just a lot of opinions, emotions and supposedly smart remarks, all wrapped up in a frame where I try to sound more hip and happening than I am, a persona I've cultivated for the best part of fifty years now and with which I'm very comfortable. It comes easily.

 

Writing long meditations on the warp and weft of mmorpgs, by comparison, feels uncannily similar to being back at college. There's a lot of reading and research, the structure has to be considered and there's a deadline to get everything done and handed in which always seems to be bearing down on me. Eventually I get it finished. Then I sit back and wait for comments. The only thing missing is a grade.

The only comment I got on the first essay I ever handed at college was succinct and to the point: "Too long". That was it, the only thing my supervisor had to say. He certainly took his own advice. 

We had some words about it. Things got quite heated. I changed supervisors for one who seemed not to mind. My essays, if anything, got longer. I wonder, now, if the first guy might not have had a point.

This, as I'm sure everyone still reading will have noticed, is yet another post about posting. There's something of a convention in the blogosphere, or this part of it, anyway, to apologize for blogging about blogging as though it's self-indulgent or tedious. It might be either or both but not necessarily. As a blogger, I lap this stuff up. It's shop talk and shop talk is only boring to people who don't work in the shop. We all work in the blog shop.

It's July now and if anyone's mentioned Blaugust 2021 I haven't seen it. Belghast is very evidently not in any position to take on the extra work and responsibilty and if he even thinks about doing it someone had better call an intervention pretty darn quick. If anyone else was planning on stepping in I guess we'd have heard about it by now. I am, for for sure, not voulunteering!

These past few years Blaugust has offered the best chance to chat about how blogging works. We usually have that week at the start where everyone comes out with their tips and hints and the week at the end where we all recap how it went and in the middle there's a lot of topic-work that frequently includes showing your workings. It's like a convention, where everyone gets to sit around and tell each other things they all already know, and yet somehow hearing other people say them helps make sense of it all.

If we're not doing that this year then I guess there are just going to be more posts like this, where we mither on about how we're doing, what's working and what isn't. Or I will, anyway. I mean, you can't just write about games all the time, right? Sometimes you just have to write about how you write about games.

That's about nine hundred words. It's not the five hundred I'm hoping to get down to but it's a start. I'm going to stop now because I can already feel a bunch more words trying to push their way to the front and I'm damned if I'm going to let them get the better of me. Again.

Now I just have to think of what to call this thing and which pictures I could use to break it up a little. That's the hard part.