Blogging is not hard, and don’t believe anyone who says that it is. Blogging is easy. Getting all the way through the Dark Tower series was the hardest thing I’ve ever done bloggingwise, and it was still easy as pie compared to virtually anything else I’ve ever done that doesn’t involve a blog–getting my driver’s license, finding a good brand of store-bought salsa through trial and error, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, hooking up my TiVo, learning how to French kiss, waking up at 6 every morning to feed my cats, deciding which KMFDM CDs to leave on display and which ones to store once I ran out of room on my CD shelves, working in publishing, washing my face before I go to bed, buying tickets to the GZA show at the Knitting Factory next Friday, anything.
I still haven’t figured out the French Kissing thing.
My blogging stumbling block always revolves around the question of how I want to spend my leisure time. I mean, it’s not hard to write down some thoughts about Superbad (or whatever), but that takes time and maybe that time would be better spent (a) watching all those Bergman movies I’ve never seen, (b) trying to get past the 30th page of The House of Seven Gables, (c) playing X-box, etc., etc. Also, one of the big reasons I enjoy blogging is that it allows me to get involved in discussions, but that means to really get the most out of blogging I need to devote extra time to reading other people’s blogs.
Blogging isn’t hard. Blogging well is hard. Not that I’d know!
Jim: Yeah, I guess that’s true. I’m really just writing for myself so the reception doesn’t bother me much one way or the other. (I DO like hearing nice things, but I don’t live or die by it.)
Jon: Well, see, that makes sense–you blog when you feel you’ll enjoy doing it and don’t when you feel like you’d enjoy doing something else instead. I think that’s the way it SHOULD be done. Mainly what I’m talking about in this post is people who do it for a living and act like they work in a shale mine.
And now that you mention it, I frequently tell people that I don’t play video games because I’ve got too many other hobbies and don’t have the time. I think blogging is probably the hobby that eats up the time that would correspond most directly to videogame-playing time.
Ken: So I hear.