Slow This Bird Down

Blogging, hgjohn, 2012

In 2010 I managed to drag this blog from the verge of antipathetical annihilation. It's strange that while I had heaps of spare time in 2009, as work had never been easier that year, I managed to produce not even 3,500 words. While 2011 was nowhere near as bad, it was a slump and the quality of the posts was patchy in my opinion. That's the challenge - I could be a perfectionist and turn next to nothing out, or I could pump out posts to meet quotas. 2012 was more of the former at the start of the year, though it was a case of maintaining a work rate. Blindly burning through my long-standing buffer of about twenty drafts would leave me at the mercy of current events to provide material. Luckily my trip to London provided impetus and I got awfully chatty about Gran Turismo 5 at the end of the year. From September through to February I was writing around 4,000 words a month, except in December when I wrote double that and January when I wrote a colossal 11,250 words - that's 55% of the word count of the entirety of 2011. You could say I was burnt out by the end of February.

I like to plan ahead in three month blocs, but too many times I knocked posts back. I was far ahead of my targets - I was 10,000 words over for the first quarter of 2013 - so I felt I could let things slide. I always reference that joke about Douglas Adams and the whooshing noise of schedules, but I was beginning to get dispirited every time I failed to crack the opening for a post. My second essay about Nationalism was scheduled for January 18th, it being the anniversary of the establishment of the German Empire; then later the 17th of March, the anniversary of the unification of the Kingdom of Italy. It may seem meaningless, but the point of scheduling essays that way is to provide an easy segue - or so I hope. Had I cracked on and put out another four thousand words I could have hit 20,000 words in the first quarter. I'm keeping track of all sorts of word counts, so believe me when I say I didn't want a post about custom tracks in Gran Turismo 5 sitting on the homepage for an entire month. Not that there's anything wrong with writing about it, but on the sliding scale of the sciences it's below the humanities (and I freely admit that about the social sciences). At this point my informal series relating to GT5 is 700 words ahead of my long-running never-quite-finished political series that was originally about Marxism, which I consider the flagship of my amateur writing career.

Let me list some drafts on the basis that it might motivate me to get them finished. Normally the joke would be that I'm padding out the word count, and that's kind of true as making this a short post will dent my beautifully high average word count which currently stands at 1,659 per post for 2013. If you thought I didn't like leaving a GT5 post on the front page for a month, you'll soon see how motivated I am not to leave one of these meta-blogging posts sitting around for long. This is in the vein of previous posts in 2008 and 2010 that revealed it can take two years for me to get from writing a title to hitting the publish button. This time I've only listed the drafts that have more than just a title. Remember, Russian web crawlers hit up a post twenty-odd times that mentioned I was trying to get my review of Buffy written and I eventually completed it... a few days short of a year. You are the audience. You decide.

• TVC15 is a holdover from last October when Ceefax and Pages From Ceefax closed down. Sometimes there isn't much to work with when it comes to my system for titling posts. Unlikely to be finished given that I'm eschewing short posts these days.
• Inside Your Croft Dated Back... is a double-double holdover from 2011 (maybe even late 2010) as it was originally two drafts that have languished. The first was on futurism and environmentalism, and the second was on history and sociology. I might split them up again as per December's TimeIsAnAsterisk.
• The Return of the Thin White Duke is of course a reference to Bowie who has come back to Earth after a decade away. The new album really hasn't gripped me, but I might do a nostalgia piece about digging though my Dad's vinyl in 2005.
• The Numbers Game is the next instalment of the Marxism series. As this post focuses on economics I've had to do a lot of reading, and bear in mind I have grievances with mathematics (see below).
• Set Pieces is actually a continuation of a draft seen way back in 2008, originally called Hyperactive (Tell Me About Your Childhood). That later spawned the 'vignettes' tag, and then a draft called ABC 123 for which I took photos in May 2008. It disappeared again until last year I intended to move out. That would have prompted clearing some of my stuff from the basement, including all my Lego I haven't seen in twelve and a half years - the Set Pieces of the title.
• Numern is a post about my grievances with mathematics. First part on language.
• Word Problems, Level 1 was held over from last year as I had reached an impasse with my conlang and took a break from the subject altogether. I came back to it this month, and hope to have something to show for it later in the year. Obviously the second part on language. [Published 25/10/13]
• You Start Wearing Blue and Brown... is me getting ahead of myself and revisiting yet another essay from college, though in this case it was a presentation of the definition(s) of fascism.
• COMPUTERLIEBE was rolled over from this year and scheduled for February 2014. The reasons for it being bumped are mentioned here and you can fill in the blanks, dear search bots.

Yes, I know writing about writing is as exciting as a movie about hackers done completely realistically. You'll just have to visualise the code. How many easy words was that?...
[1051]