I’ve always felt that this blog lacked structure. Ideas taken from anywhere, writing when I pleased. I’m profoundly perfectionist, so this freedom has been a bad thing. When I first started this blog, circa 2000, I titled it “Entertainment for People with Short Attention Spans”. Quite a vast claim. No wonder I often preferred to write nothing at all, rather than risk failing to live up to such a title. I had to be entertaining, and quickly.
A friend of mine recommended that I adopt a (more narrow) theme. She’d started writing a blog about The New Yorker, and within that niche had found both an audience and a nearly constant stream of topics; every week the magazine produced fresh fodder for her and her readers.
I felt she was right; the constraint of a topic would be good for me the way haiku is good for poetry. So I considered re-branding this blog as one the following:
- Tales from the New York Subway.
I strongly dislike driving, love not buying gas, enjoy not paying insurance, and do appreciate being able to drink as much as I like. The Subway is one of the best things about New York. It makes the city what it is. Whatever our age, income bracket, race, religion, or bathing habits, we all (most of us) take the same train, shoulder to shoulder, armpit to nose, and buttock to buttock. It’s where the melting pot mixes up its ingredients.
Subway Blog was going to kick off with an Andy-Roony-esque observation – “did you ever notice how …” – an empty Snapple bottle gets left on the floor, rolls forward and back with each acceleration/deceleration, and how people lift their feet to let it pass.
Sounded good. But what to write for entry #2? Body odor? Panhandlers? Flirting at rush hour? I feared my ideas would run dry. - Trevor’s Travel Texts Lots of this already, both from me and many others. And since I generally feel like I’m travelling, this topic seemed too broad.
- Bachelor Man Tells All Sexy. But I feared that writing about being single would force me to stay single, and I’d constantly face the question of how much “detail” to expose, whose privacy to respect, and which fake name to use.
- Techmology For The Newbie Person (Ruby, Javascript, CSS, Frash…)
As a computer programmer, I read lots of tekkie blogs; they play a vital role in my continuing self-education. But writing about technology means you must be right; you’ll be read by other programmers; lots of peer review. And I knew that I’d take my sweet time getting to the point. Programmers just want the code they can copy and paste intot heir program:
Trevor.best_ideas.map { |i| puts pontificate_over(i) }... but I’d spend hours honing down a preamble, and a tangent, excessively editing, working in a favorite old story about a purple bicycle I rode in Mandalay.
There were others. Picking a topic was, itself, turning into a perfectionist exercise; yet another excuse to not write. Screw it!
One entry per week, to be published on Wednesday
Simple. Flexible. With a built in enforcement mechanism. I could stick “One entry per week” somewhere in the title.
Trevor Stow: Published Every Wednesday
It was originally going to be Tuesday, but it’s Wednesday today, and rather than wait another 6 days, which could turn into 13 if I get into edit-obsessively mode.
And for how long will I keep this up? I’ll say one year, at least to start. That means fifty two entries will happen. This is my commitment.