Just Getting On With It

I really need to just get back to this writing thing I do.

There are two things that come to mind about what's making just getting on with it so hard right now, though. The first is what I made an attempt to talk about on my Mixlr show last week: even though I'm doing this mostly because I enjoy it, it would really be nice to get some reaction from the audience I know I have. It really has less to do with the Patreon thing than I may have made it sound like in that podcast. Sure, that's part of it, naturally. I'd love to think that there are folks out there who get enough entertainment, enough joy out of these silly little blog posts and rambling, idiotic podcasts and such that I do that they'd be willing to throw a little money my way for doing them.

I've been putting some thought into that recently. Maybe more than I should have, but it takes having ideas to get started with pretty much anything. And really, my problem is not having ideas. My problem is doing things with them. I think what's slowing me down here is that I'm looking too much at the statistics I get from places like Blogger and YouTube, in that when I look at them, I see that a post like this will get almost as many hits as a Text Play issue or a YouTube video I do where I sit and talk into my webcam about something for five minutes, as examples. So, I know people are watching, listening, and reading my stuff. Beyond that, there's little to no reaction, and unfortunately for me, I'm under the very probably false impression that knowing what people most want to see and/or hear out of me will do me some good, get me motivated somehow.

The other thing that comes to mind is a conversation I seem to keep having with my grandmother. Every couple months, I'll have a chance to chat with her one-on-one, and almost invariably, she'll say something about how she thinks my brother is a dreamer because he seems to have high goals that he has trouble reaching. The thing about that is that when I'm actually talking with her, I can't bring myself to tell her that what she's saying is quite a bit more true of me than it is of him.

See, here's the thing about my brother, though. He wanted to get a doctorate, and after quite a lot of time and effort, he almost has. Granted, if you'd asked me the same thing in the spring of 2013, I'd have said that he almost had his doctorate then, too, and the only thing that's really changed in the year and a half or so since then is that he's got a job that pays in the area of $60,000 a year, based on the supposition that he'd be done with his degree by now.

Me, on the other hand? I'm a little different. The highest degree I've got is a bachelors degree in something called liberal studies. It's basically the four-year college equivalent of a high school diploma. Granted, I did take quite a lot of writing courses while I was there, because I'd hoped to get a job as a journalist when I'd finished. That, well, dream of mine has come true to an extent, because I do have blogs on Blogger and Tumblr, and I do try to do a webcast on Mixlr on a regular, if not weekly, basis.

Am I getting any closer to making the silly little fantasy of doing this for a living come true? Not so much that I can tell. Quite a lot of it has to do with personal issues, mostly related to a severe lack of self confidence and an awful tendency to procrastinate.

One thing that might help with that is getting some idea of what my audience likes so I can do more of that. To make that happen, I need to get back to doing what I was back when I started on Blogger back in 2010 and just start throwing things out there to see what sticks. It worked before, after all. That's why I've stuck with the Text Play series for so long. It couldn't hurt to try again in hopes that the same will hold true again.

In order to make that happen, I really need to sit down and make a schedule again. Having a plan for when I'm going to have certain things posted really did help. I just need to get my flabby white behind in gear and make that happen again.

Wish me luck, folks. I'm going to need it.