The State of Blog 03/07/2019

The constant push and pull between my attempts at productivity and my brain problems continues!

With the arrival of the summer, my neurological symptoms have gotten worse again (heat and light exacerbate them to no end) and I’m also on a new treatment for at least the next four and a half months that seems to be throwing everything out of whack. The upshot of this is that I don’t have a whole lot of energy for blogging (or anything else) at the moment.

My current plan is to very slowly write a few more World War Z posts (it turns out most of the content I wanted to talk about is in the first half of the book), and then after that I think I’m going to have to stop committing to ongoing post series; I come up with them when my condition is at a low point, and then inevitably it picks up again and knocks me over a few weeks or months later. I’d prefer not to leave things unfinished, so it’s probably best to not start long-term projects at the moment.

(I realize that two and a half years is a long time to come to this stunning revelation, but chronic illness doesn’t come with an instruction manual).

So what is this blog going to be used for going forward?

Probably a lot of one-off reviews and other things that occur to me randomly. The “let’s read” format is just too energy intensive right now, as it requires something resembling research (if you can believe that) and my memory issues mean that I have to keep re-reading parts of whatever book I’m covering in case I forget the story.

But perhaps let’s read content doesn’t have to go away entirely! There have been mysterious rumblings recently about the third Kingkiller Chronicle book maybe, possibly appearing next year-ish, possibly maybe. That’s gotten me thinking about the old Kvothe posts that made me Internet Famous on my old blog. I previously expressed dissatisfaction with them and tried to re-formulate them into a series of long-form essays, which proved to be too much work, but lately I’ve been kicking around the idea of just porting them over here directly, with some of the “humor” and other content I now dislike trimmed off and some minor clean-up work done. Basically a director’s (blogger’s?) cut, if you will.

To be clear, I’m not actually committing to this: it would still take a level of effort that might be currently beyond me, and I’m not entirely sure it’s an idea worth pursuing. Leave a comment if that sounds like something you’d be interested in. I might do one or two as a test run at some point and see how people respond.

Another topic I have my eye on is opinion and politics writing. I’m sure you’re all aware that there’s a lot of…”noteworthy” things happening globally right now, and since I’m a self-aggrandizing blowhard I always get the urge to comment on those things. Some people didn’t like it when I went off about Trump or whatever on my old blog (because they couldn’t handle the truth), but thanks to the Power Of Squarespace I can make as many blogs as I want on the same domain so maybe I’ll spin up a seperate one for my politics ramblings.

There’s one more blog endeavour I’ve been considering, which is guest posts. I’m paying for the domain to this site every month but not always putting it to a whole lot of use, so I’d like to offer a platform for other people to submit content. Again, I’m not announcing my intention to start doing this right now—there’ll be a seperate post with the details sometime in the future if I do decide to pull the trigger on it—but I’m bringing it up here to gauge responses to the idea. This site has a tiny readership, but it does have a readership, which is more than most people just starting out have access to. I’m particularly interested in the idea of hosting minority perspectives and criticism.

Seperate from the blog, I’ve been trying to use some of my unlimited free time (for those who don’t know, I can’t currently work) to learn new skills. This is something I have to be really careful with because it’s easy to exhaust myself in a way that seriously impairs my day to day functioning, but I do like to try it when I can in order to be in a better position vis a vis job oppurtunities when I eventually recover. One of the skills I’ve had my eye on for a while is learning how to produce and edit videos, in order to potentially get in on that sweet Youtube audience that’s been eclipsing blogs for the last, uh, decade and change.

Once more with feeling: this is not a promise of future content, I’m not going to launch a Youtube channel next month. It’s just something I’d like to take some tentative steps towards over the rest of the year. To that end, if anyone has links to good beginner resources (or would even be potentially open to letting me bounce questions off them if the need arises), it would be appreciated.

Lastly, I want to thank everyone who’s been following my internet ramblings from all the way back in the Kvothe days to now, through the dry spells caused by my medical issues these last two and a half years. At some point I intend to take some steps towards actually growing the readership, but for the moment I kind of like my cosy little blog nook with a small audience. Here, have a dog photo as a reward: