How To Write Nearly A Thousand Words On How To Keep Things Short

One week to go until Blaugust and I've done absolutely nothing about stockpiling posts to cover the days I don't have time to write. Okay, I did make that list of fallback ideas but just having ideas isn't a whole lot of use if you don't do anything with them and I really haven't.

I have thought about them a bit though and - honestly? - they all seem like they'd either take at least as long to put together as a regular post, which pretty much defeats the whole object, or they'd be so perfunctory I'd be ashamed to use them. 

So, I thought about it so more and it (Finally!) occurred to me that Blaugust, even in its original conception, was never about posting every single day for the whole of the month of August. Bel spells it out as clearly as you could possibly wish in his introduction to this year's event:

The original challenge was to post 31 times during the month of August which is 31 days long. This can be posting every day or doubling up on some days to make the schedule a bit easier. 

I'm not quite sure why I've never really noticed that before. I mean, I knew it but I didn't know it, if you get my drift. I'd say I "grok"it now if it wasn't that even admitting to knowing that word, let alone using it, makes me borderline queasy.

a free-thinking maverick
who plays by their own rules
(polished, clockpunk)

The realisation makes things significantly easier for me. The real problem was always going to be posting on the days I work, something that can be awkward or even enervating. When I come back from work I barely have time to do my dailies and walk the dog before bedtime.

Granted, that's largely due to my insistence on being in bed at a ridiculously early hour, until recently before it even got properly dark, just so I can watch four or five TV shows before I go to sleep. I didn't say it was a real problem. 

Oh, heck, wait... yes I did say exactly that, didn't I? I should listen to myself when I'm talking, at least once in a while.

It was a lot easier when I stayed at the computer for another two or three hours every evening and never went to bed until well after midnight, I can tell you. It's true what they say about television, whatever it is that they say. Something derogatory, anyway, I bet.

The ironic thing about creating a whole bunch of "traditions" for myself that I feel I have to uphold, along with an almanac of invented superstitions I have to abide by, all done in the name of convincing myself I'm a free-thinking maverick who plays by their own rules, a bit like the renegade anti-hero of a 1970s cop show, is that all of this completely optional nonsense, far from feeling like light, fluffy, character-defining fun, can end up feeling instead like I've carved a set of unbreakable commandments out of stone and trapped myself under them, because if there's one thing defines freedom and individuality better than any other, it's an inflexible set of totally arbitrary, pointless, self-imposed rules.

That was a fun sentence to write! To read? Not so much, I'm guessing.

And now I'm starting to sound like Homura

Anyway, the upshot is that my new plan isn't to pump up a bunch of safety balloons in advance (Safety balloons? Is that a thing? Pretty sure it's not. Probably shouldn't have drawn attention to it. And now I'm starting to sound like Homura. Did I say that out loud?) but to stick with my preferred method of winging it, only on the understanding I can skip a day and catch up by double-posting later. 

Or treble-posting. Or more. Because the other bright idea I had is microposting.

I can't remember how many times I've said I'd love to be able to write shorter posts. It's been a goal of mine for years. Every time I try, though, my innate logorrhoea kicks in and the whole thing gets away from me. Blaugust is probably one of the only times I manage to keep at least a few posts down to a reasonable word count.

I'd very much like to encourage that in the hope I might begin to get the hang of it. I'm not suggesting I'm going to put up a single video or screenshot and call it a post, although since I don't use Twitter (Sorry - X.) I'm often tempted to do just that. I'll have to give myself a minimum content requirement of, oh, I don't know, let's pick some arbitrary value... maybe two hundred and fifty words? Does that seem reasonable?

Done that way, a few of those ideas I listed for myself ought to work pretty well but I should be able to adapt the whole concept to anything. I could split all those "Friday" Grab Bags and post the individual items separately for a start although even then I bet I'd need to edit most of them down. They always overrun.

It's a plan, anyway. It could work. Also, it sounds like fun. And a learning experience. Those are good, right?

I suppose, if I'm going to have any chance of succeeding in keeping things crisp I ought to get some practice in right away. So I'll stop here.

 

 

 

Well that felt weird...