Recapturing What I Love

I have a problem. I love writing and I love this blog. I started this blog ten months ago not knowing what I was going to do with it. I even stated in my first post that it may take me a while to find my voice. Since then I have written on a variety of topics: getting a good parking space, my disdain for sports, children, cold weather, drive thrus, and Russian literature, experiences raising my children, a minute-by-minute report of the blizzard that almost killed us, and the origin of rainbows.

I have shamelessly promoted myself on Facebook, Twitter, Viewshound, Triond, and many other sites to get more readers. I have subscribed to the sites of other bloggers so that I can expand my web presence by commenting on their blogs in the hope that they will come to visit mine and maybe bring some of their readers with them.

I have enjoyed looking at my stats page to see how many people have read something that I have written. I have reveled in the knowledge that I have readers in Slovenia, Croatia, Germany, South Africa, Latvia, Philippines, Iran and 53 other countries. I have uploaded some of my posts to other websites, won a few awards, and have even been paid for some of the things I wrote.

As great as this may sound, here is my problem: I am not enjoying it. When I first started this blog, I just wrote. I wrote my little stories and it was fun. Most of them were humorous. I love being the funny guy. However, it doesn’t always come easy. It takes a while to think these things up, and sometimes it takes even longer to figure out how to tell the story. Occasionally, I would write a serious piece. Three of my Top 10 posts (one about Kirsten, one about Christian, and one about parenting in general) have been about my relationship with my kids.

The serious pieces are much easier to write because I just have to tell the story. The funny ones are challenging, but definitely more fun to write. Many times I will have some mundane experience and decide that it would make a decent topic for a blog, but I spend several days figuring out how to tell the story in a clever way before it makes it to the computer.

I really enjoy the writing process and plan to continue to write, but I am going to make some changes. I have put so much time and effort into promotion of my writing, that it has become a chore I do not look forward to every morning. I subscribed to about 20 other bloggers with a large readership to get more exposure. However, reading all these blogs every day so I can leave comments was taking too much time. Plus, as my audience began to grow, I felt more pressure to produce something of high quality. Rather than sitting down and doing what I love, I fretted over quality and spent time trying to promote. In the meantime, my writing has slowed down and I find myself stalling to write another one.

It has been one month since my last post and I do not ever want that to happen again. I have been really busy this past month with camp and school registration, but my readers would know that if I had been writing and telling my story.

I want to pledge right now that I am putting my concentration back on my writing and not on promotion. I understand that this may cause my audience to shrink, but I started doing this because I love writing and that is what I intend to do. I am setting a goal of at least one post per week from this point forward.

Thank you to all my readers. I love getting your feedback and comments. I hope to keep seeing you.