From Blog Fail To Blogging Tenacity

I had been wanting to start a blog for literally years. I had a liveJournal that I attended to regularly for about a decade before I discovered Facebook for my social needs and let LJ slide. I’m not sure LJ counts as a blog blog… or does it? It’s a blogging platform, but it doesn’t feel legit as far as blogging goes. It’s like a “planned community”… a housing tract full of neighbors, some of whom you mesh with, but others you keep complaining to the HOA about, and that HOA does nothing to clean the place up. So you quit paying your dues, pack up your Uhaul and move your ass outta there. You want your own home where you call the shots.

So I bought a domain name, Spooky Style, and planned to connect it to a blog, because I had big plans for it. It was going to be a blog about year-round spooky living, with a romantic bent. That was eight years ago. Every year as October approached I got the itch to finally work on it, and after October? Fizzle. Eight times. I still have the domain. I still haven’t quite decided what to do with it. I think it would be really interesting to turn it into a Pinterest-like forum where visitors could pin their favorite spooky fashion, decor, gardens… but that’s beyond my level of know-how right now.

I think became addicted to domains. I own about 20 right now, and guess what I’m doing with them? Mostly nothing. I started out buying one each time I got a new idea for a blog – Dolly Nomnom, Midcentury Mixup, Hidden Mickey Fail (ended up letting that one expire), Adorable Outfits –  and then I bought others because they were just good names. I planned to develop them and auction them off. But who has time for that? Only people who have a bazillion personal assistants, that’s who.

Where was I anyway? Got sidetracked. This is supposed to be about blogs, not domains, Kat!

I quit my job recently (no, I’m not sidetracking again). The shifts and hours were taking a huge toll on me mentally and physically, and it was affecting my family, so home I went. I had heard about blogging for profit, and thought maybe that could be something to strive for, though I had zero idea if that was something I could accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. A month, a year, three years? Never? What if I put a buttload of time into it, but couldn’t figure out the formula to make it profitable? I decided to take that risk. I already had a book about Mom Blogging, and a book about WordPress, so I studied a little and started to ease into it.

I bought The Cardboard Kitty. I played with the theme. I learned a lot of the ins and outs of WordPress. I had fun, easily learning stuff that I previously thought was out of my league. I couldn’t come up with a decent header image, and am still unable to because I can’t picture the right one in my head to draw it out… but I started blogging anyway, even though my blog was (and is) ugly. I was off to a pretty good start.

And then I slacked off because I didn’t have a direction. Ugh! I couldn’t pinpoint what I wanted the blog to be about, and that Mom Blogging book told me in no uncertain terms I needed to narrow my shit down and claim a niche if I ever wanted to be profitable. And I deflated.

And then I found BlogHer. Oh, BlogHer, how I love thee! Though it was but a mere two weeks ago, for the life of me I can’t remember how I ran across BlogHer, but I’m so very grateful I did. Because BlogHer’s NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) put the wind back in my sails and challenged me to just keep swimming. A post per day for an entire month. I discovered NaBloPoMo few days late, starting November 6th, but I figure I can stretch my month through December 6th and still complete that goal.

I’m no longer thinking about profit. I’m using NaBloPoMo to develop a tenacity, a perseverance. I don’t care if I’m themed or if I’ve chained my ass to a niche. I just need to write. That’s what’s important right now.

Some days I write like a mad dog, ideas flying out of my brain like bottle rockets and exploding in brilliance. Other days my rockets just fizzle out and it’s all I can do to flick that lighter and get one haphazard, subpar little post out.

Tonight? Tonight I had a post in mind, all planned out. I knew what I wanted to say, but when I started writing, it went off in another direction, and I’m sort of wondering what the hell just happened. I t-boned my post with random thoughts and just kept going. I guess that sums up the point? Don’t look back. Just keep going.

Good night.