My 2023 Blogging Commitment

As it is January and thus still very much a time for making unrealistic pledges, I’m still fairly confident that I’m going to turn around my 2022 blogging slump and actually post quite regularly in 2023.

However, my ambitions are tempered with a little reality – gone are the days of posting daily as I managed for an entire year between March 2020 and March 2021. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that that level of blogging commitment was only possible for the following reasons:

1. There was a pandemic – even though I still had to work for quite a lot of that pandemic, I definitely had an increase in disposable time during that unhappy period.
2. The pandemic also meant that I tended to use blogging as a coping strategy because pandemics are quite stressful things. While there are still a multitude of stresses and strains on my daily existence, I’m not sure I’m in quite such a heightened state as I was during the spring of 2020, hence blogging is once more a hobby rather than a therapeutic necessity.
3. I only had one child. One child can hamper the productivity of even the most committed blogger, and my pandemic-fuelled blogging spree was actually preceded by a similar blogging slump to the one I experienced last year, but, during that hiatus, I always assumed I would get back to blogging at some point. This time around I have been less certain as to whether blogging is a sustainable pastime. Obviously, it is sustainable, there are lot of bloggers who are also parents, but it is definitely harder to find time with two small children than it was with one. Particularly without the benefit of a global health crisis to underpin it all.
4. I did write a lot of haikus. Which does make it easier to churn out daily content, particularly when you ignore most of the rules surrounding what makes a haiku a haiku and instead just rely on counting syllables.

Anyway, I’ve decided that I will still blog and attempt to blog regularly, but that level of regularity will be somewhat less than daily. I think, at this point I’m going for weekly. I may revise this schedule.

One would hope that a schedule that is less reliant on quantity may allow for a little quality to filter through onto these pages, and no-one would be happier than me were that to be the case. But unlike Icarus, I shall not attempt to fly too close to the sun and so my commitment to attempting to blog at least once a week will not be subject to any kind of quality control whatsoever.

For example, producing a post about my blogging ambitions for the coming year was not really my intention when I started writing this. I had fully been intending to write about how uncomfortable my new shoes are, which is much more in line with kind of hard-hitting content you might expect to see on James Proclaims.

But I wrote this instead.

Which isn’t really anything much and probably not the greatest omen for what is to come in future weeks.

I will try and get an update out about the shoes soon though – I imagine a few people are probably keen to know how that situation resolves itself.

In the meantime, if you are feeling a little short-changed by the redundancy of this particular offering, console yourself that it is not a haiku.

I haven’t actually written a haiku for this blog since March 2021.

I am weirdly proud of this fact.

I suppose as I’ve gone all in on what is essentially a prosaic admin update on the inner workings of my blog, I might as well offer a little commentary about comments.

I have, for some time now, taken to closing the comments section of my posts after a period of time has elapsed (this period has ranged from 1 to 7 days depending on my whim at the time). This is mainly as a way of controlling spam – the bots do like to comment on really old posts, often incoherently but occasionally posting links to sites that are…well let’s just say ‘not safe for work’.

However, limiting the amount of time my actual readers have available to comment on posts means that I also have a slightly more realistic chance of getting around to reading and replying to those comments. Which is something I always intend to do but, as it turns out, not something that I do always do. So, apologies if, upon reading this, you find that you really wish to add a thoughtful and/or insightful comment only to discover that you’ve missed the window. Then again, if this post did inspire you to wish to write a thoughtful and/or insightful comment, then it is possible you have slightly overvalued the words you have just read.