The state of the blog and the week ahead for The Went Report

On the 30th April, I wrote a rather dispirited post where I acknowledged that I did not anticipate that I would be able to turn this into a fully functioning blog as I'd written precisely nothing in 8 days despite having given myself, as I thought, the freedom to do so.

Since that post I have  written 22 posts, comfortably exceeding my output in the previous 6 years! In addition , I have 2 drafts close to publication and a post with the best part of five thousand words nearing publication readiness. For an encore, I adjusted the settings on the blog and added some links so it functions like a real blog! Most of my posts have gained a small audience, smaller than what I am hoping I will have down the track, but better than nothing. My review of The Announcement has been picked up somewhere, as it continues to steadily add viewers, it is now past the 100 mark and gets a few views every day. Consequently, I  upgraded the post last week in response to that as it was a pretty thin review.

I usually advertise my posts on Facebook, and I have mentioned a couple of them on reddit and Stumble Upon and in varying Facebook forums. I will continue to do this and I hope some people will end up reading the blog on a regular basis.

I'm anticipating that my upcoming Bejweled Blitz series of posts will set some blog records for me. I think they are more likely than most of my posts to attract search engine attention over time and I think they will get  a fair number of visits from Facebook too, and the posts will remain topical for quite a while so  I'll mention them periodically on the Bejeweled Blitz fan forums. I'm thinking that a thousand views isn't an unreasonable expectation for them to get over time, and that higher than that is not impossible. 

My old list of possible blog topics has been organised, updated and is being added to as ideas occur to me. While I primarily write for myself I believe that there are other people who share some of my interests and feelings and will enjoy reading some of the things that I have to say. 

This week I'm looking to develop and post an account of my Tuesdays with Cassie, as I want a detailed post recording what she and I have done during her pre-school years to be available as she ages. I intend to post Part I of my Bejeweled series next Sunday, and publish the other parts on the following 2 Sundays. My book of the week post for this week will be about the Hairy Maclary books which Cassie and I have been having a ball with lately. My movie of the week for next week only needs some polishing and it's done, it's about the ESPN 30-30 documentary Broke.

This post actually started changing into something different about the nature of writing and the nature of my involvement with writing and I think it's the most deeply personal thing I've written, it's not done yet but I already feel the blood dripping onto the keyboard from the veins I opened up while I was writing it. That will be posted tomorrow.

The week ahead for the Went Report

I've been blogging regularly for the last week and a bit and I've really been enjoying it, none of my posts have attracted a lot of viewers yet but there's been the odd look and I expect this will increase over time. As I'm enjoying it, there's a fair chance I'll keep doing it and that should help me find an audience!

There's a number of posts in the pipeline for this week, I watched another of those thoroughly absorbing ESPN sports documentaries last week about Jimmy Connors' 1991 run at the US Open tennis and I'll be putting up a review about that. I'm currently reading Gideon Haigh's confronting account of pre-abortion Victoria, the Racket, and I'll be reviewing that once it's done as well.

One of my Facebook obsessions in recent years has been Bejeweled Blitz so I'm putting together a guide to playing it. This is already a long post and I haven't even finished the first section yet. So it'll be divided into several sections once finished and posted over a number of days. I have hopes that this series will eventually attract a good number of readers, Bejeweled Blitz has over 6 million followers and I'm hoping a few of them will end up reading my posts.

Improving at chess is one of my current obsessions, after a decade of playing it with no attempts to improve, and I'll be putting together a post about my plans to do so, that will probably appear next week.

I've been keeping my powder dry about the upcoming Australian Budget, but there's going to be quite a bit in there for me to take aim at, and I anticipate a long, fiery post or 2 about it! And there should be time for several short posts about whatever crosses my keyboard at the right time.

I am just so stoked to finally be out there writing regularly, even without much of an audience yet, this is a drug! The more I'm getting , the more I want.

The Went Report

As part of updating the blog, I've named it properly as The Went Report!!!

The Went Report was the name that I gave to my opinion pieces that I wrote about rugby league when I was back in Year 5. I would finish my work, ask for a piece of art paper and go write a report about what was happening in the game. The title was stolen from Geoff Prenter, who was the editor of Rugby League Week at the time and wrote a weekly column titled the Prenter Report. 

The Went Report recurred in some other guises during my high school years and I've retained a fondness for the title, hence its selection as my blog.

As a perusal of the archive will show, I set up the blog 6 years ago and entertained varying visions of becoming a prolific blogger, now that I'm not entertaining such visions, I've finally organised the blog and started telling people about it.

The main purpose for the blog is to give me a space to write longer spiels than fit in a Facebook status post. Sometimes I'll include updates about my family and career, other times I'll write about my interests. I expect that most posts will be fairly short and that lengthy spiels will be irregular.

My interests include books, current affairs, sports, sustainability issues, science, education and so most of my posts will relate to one of those. However, I will write about whatever I feel like writing, irrespective of whether I have promised to write about it previously. I don't intend to make money out of the blog and I'm not particularly concerned about how large the audience is, which frees me to write as I please.

I'm not certain as to how regularly I will post,  so rather than making any grandiose claims that subsequent events will disprove, I will simply post as I feel like it and see how many posts I make.

There are still a few things I have to do with the updating process so there's a good chance that additional changes will occur here.

I've finally made the blog look presentable and I'm sharing it with people I know - this is rather exciting! 

8 days ago, I said that I would keep the blog in easy range on my desktop and write as often as I felt like, without putting pressure on myself. Well, this is the 1st post, I haven't really felt like writing much.

But I have been very focused upon certain goals during that week. I added Khan Academy to my desktop and I have been doing loads of work on it every day, I signed up for a chess tactics server, chesstempo and I've been doing numerous tactical exercises. So I most definitely have been spending my computer time in a purposeful manner, it's just that it appears that regular blog writing isn't going to be a big part of that purpose.

I haven't been forcing myself to complete chess puzzles or Maths exercises, I've been doing it because I enjoy them. I like the fact that there will be long term gains from doing them, but that's not the main reason I'm doing them, I'm getting enough pleasure out of doing them at the time to keep me interested.

I can't see myself turning this blog into a full blown blog with daily updates. That being the case, it would appear that the primary use for this blog will be a personal blog, a place for family updates and occasional rants and comments that are too long to fit into a Facebook update.

I'd been envisioning using Silken Musings for that, but my greater emotional attachment to the Went Report title means that this would be a better location to use. So it will be used for that.

I'd been thinking of adding a few posts and then doing the work of including some links and advertising the blog as part of my online presence. But I'm just going to add the links over the next few days and start letting people know about the blog. I hope that a few people will stop by and say hello, but I'm not entertaining any great notions of it becoming a genuinely popular blog, because I'm simply not interested in putting in the necessary effort for that to happen.

The next couple of posts will be about chess and Khan Academy as they're my current passions online and are worth mentioning.

Another writing spiel

I think I've had it wrong with my approach to my blogs, the idea in my head has been that I would put a lot of effort into each post and create many well structured and finely written posts. The paucity of previous posts demonstrates the failure of this strategy.

Similarly, apart from the odd journal post, I haven't done a lot of other writing off blog either, despite the enjoyment I get from writing. I'm not aiming to be a writing professional, I just want to write as a hobby, so I need to lower my expectations of each post.

Blog posts are generally ephemeral, read briefly, by a few people, and promptly forgotten. The key, then, is to write, to make posts, regular posts, so that an audience can be built.

What sort of audience would I like? Well, if I knew that 50 people were going to read an average blog post and that 100 might read an interesting one and 20 might read a boring one, I'd be perfectly happy with my audience size. That's not a large number and should be achievable, given some time and effort.

What should I write these posts about? Well, whatever I feel like is, I think, a perfectly valid answer. Not wanting to make money off the blog, not needing a large audience, means that I have the freedom to write as I please.

I expect that posts about politics, current affairs, sport, ecological and environmental issues, books,  education, schooling, tutoring are likely to be the dominant topics, with posts about other topics appearing as it suits me.

I think most posts should be drafted and posted quickly, in response to my motivation at the time, with some posts taking a greater effort.

There's 8 days left in the month, I'm going to try and keep dashing off quick posts for those 8 days, both here and on the family blog. If I find that I've posted regularly, then I will add some links, do some work on the look of the blogs and start actively seeking readers.

If it doesn't happen, then I'll just continue to post periodically, more as an online journal than anything intended to reach an audience.

I am a writer

A year ago, I claimed that I was organising this blog. It did not happen, I was claiming that I would use it for my teacher librarian course, but that didn't happen either.

What brings me back here then? A desire to spend my time doing more things that are fulfilling, as opposed to things that are fun, but ultimately don't contribute to living a richer, active life. A wish to live up to, even in just a small way, the sentiments expressed so movingly by Neil Gaiman in his New Years Day posts. http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2011/12/my-new-year-wish.html

This is my little attempt to make something that didn't exist before, to help it find an audience, to share some of who I am. To write more and dream of writing less. Sharon Astyk wrote that " The personal is the political" so I would like to look at my beliefs and ideas and experiences through that personal prism.

Initially I used blogging to upload the many travelogues I wrote on past trips. I wanted those pieces to have a wider audience but I never went out and found them one. I intend to re-visit those pieces and add images to them from my own photos where possible and from other sources where it isn't. 
I propose to finally write some pieces about my honeymoon with the wonderful Kristy. My dear friend Michael is becoming an old man waiting for my take on the great city of London, I intend to show him that it was merely a long delayed piece, rather than a hypothetical.

I want to talk about my goals and what I am doing to achieve them, I want to hear what your goals are, and how you are trying to live out your ideals in the real world.

I want to share with you some of my favourite corners of the Internet and what makes them work for me, and I want to hear what sites have helped shape and guide you.

I want to become a small part of the blogging community here and have an online presence where we can share a little of who we are, I spent many years as a passionate member of the Internet Chess Club, and I truly miss that online community that once existed there.

What sort of topics can I envision being discussed here? I am a husband, a father, a teacher, a secular humanist, a reader, a lover of learning, a hypocritical environmentalist, so I expect many of my posts will revolve around those themes.

At this stage though, I don't want to limit myself , I would rather let some of the themes of the blog develop over time. I'm not writing this blog to make my fortune or to become famous. I'm writing it because I want to share my thoughts and experiences with others. I want to be an active writer, not an imaginary one. I want to write with energy and passion and focus, and I want to write regularly instead of sporadically. To realise that I set up this blog over 5 years ago and that I have simply let it drift is to be reminded of how much time I have frittered away in my life. I am 42 now and past the halfway stage of my life. I wish to do more fulfilling things with the time that remains for me, for I have realised that it isn't the experiences we have that we ultimately regret. Rather, we regret the things we do not do.

So, here I am, making a step forward in my life, along a path that has called to me for so long. I took the road more travelled by, and only now have I made my way to another crossroad. From this day forth, when people ask me what I do, I will add one phrase.

I am a writer.