Blogging and the difficulty of time

I resolved some time ago to blog more often than I do. This has fallen by the wayside, in part due to time, in part due to not being able to think of topics, but mostly, I admit, due to laziness. I thought it was time I worked through why I should, if indeed I should, blog more and where better to do that than in my blog.

Well, the first reason is that I like to write and want to get better at it. I'd like to find a voice that is in some way mine; find a way to get the sarcastic, irreverent voice in my head onto the page without loosing anything academic in what I say. I want to get beyond the stuffy, anti-fluffy, unreasonably and often inexplicable constraints of academic writing and cut through with something fresher. To add a tang of lemon zest in the usually bland salad of writing. Ideally, I want to be able to serve that same salad to my peers, tickling the intellectual tastebuds of peer reviewers and public consumers alike.

The second reason was to allow myself the opportunity to shepherd my thoughts on whatever reading, thinking, writing, videoing or listening I had done recently, with the old dog of 'someone might read this' forcing enough structure to ensure my usually wayward and curious thoughts go into a single pen together. Easier written than, well, written.

The last reason was because maybe, just maybe someone might like reading my mad rambling and have something constructive to say about it.

This is all good, so what is really stopping me?

Well, this important aspect is one of those I put off, perhaps due to.the tyranny of a blank screen. Previous attempts have remained too close, in my mind, to academic concerns and worries about saying too much or too little. I have thought about academic rigour and the time this involves, and decided that for a blog read by a dozen people it's not worth it. Ironic I know considering that the amount of time I intend to spend on a thesis that, unless I'm lucky, will be read by many fewer.

But it's not you, it's me, or rather it's about me. It's about me finding my voice, working out how best to structuate my verbal usements; hopefully not like that. It also about improving precision in time, speeding up my writing process so that I can be more accurate in less time. It's about becoming a natural writer, seeking out new usages and new vocabulary, to boldly take my language and knowledge where no split infinitives have gone before.

So my decision is this. I am going to take Matt Houlbrook's advice from the seminar I attended earlier. Whenever I can, as often as I can, I'm going to write a blog post about something, anything, and take at most one hour, but usually just 30 minutes, doing so. It will be one draft, one hit, warts and all and I am not going to read it back. So there may be type-os, and misspelled words, and grammatical errors but so be it. Perfection is not the point of the exercise. 

So when will I start this?

I just have.