Where’s The Blog?

For the last few years, I haven’t written anything on my blog. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Like most personal blogs, mine has been a mix of random ideas based on my interests and personal experiences, sporadically updated and mostly sitting in the ether of the internet with no interest from anyone (including me).

I enjoy writing, and appreciate the value of sharing, but two main themes kept me from writing anything at all:

1. What to say
2. Finding time to say it

What To Say

First, some background: I work in a software engineering career, and outside of work spend as much time as I possibly can with my family. In the little (well, truly very minuscule) bit of spare time I have, I make music. If I was to write about anything, work, family and music seem to be areas that I possibly could cover based purely on where I spend my time and energy. 

And I tried. But, looking back at the few blog posts I wrote, there is obviously no theme or cohesiveness, besides being written by me and thus being my experiences. This isn’t compelling for anyone stumbling on my blog (let alone a friend or relative that may know me!). Someone reading an article about “How to get an interview at a software company” probably would have no interest in “My Retro Computer Music”, and vice versa.

And the more I read professional blogs targeted for a specific audience, the more I realized I had even less to say. There are plenty of blogs about writing, recording or releasing music. There are plenty of articles on Medium about succeeding in high-tech, or raising a family. I really didn’t have anything extra to offer that those other writers didn’t cover already, so why write anything at all? And even if I did write, who’d read it (being that I’m not famous, not a super-blogger, and not wanting to become any of those)?

Finding Time To Say It

But even more than “What to say”, I didn’t have any time to say it. This was a purposeful decision rather than procrastination.  I made a concentrated effort to keep an intense focus on what was most important to me. Outside of my two main priorities (my family always comes first, and work requires a huge level of commitment, energy and dedication), the one thing I wanted to pursue is creating an album of original music for my kids. 

So year after year, the blog was at a standstill, and as each year passed, writing another article seemed more like a daunting task (in both effort of what to say, and in time commitment)! 

Time To Simplify…Almost

Thus, earlier in 2019, I decided it was time to simplify. Actually, I love the idea of simplifying and focusing on what’s important, and even the small effort and cost it took to run a dynamic site (with multiple pages and sub-pages, a PHP backend, whilst maintaining good CSS, updated JavaScript libraries, and trying to perfect a responsive design with new devices constantly coming to market) was something I could reprioritize to focus on making more music. 

So I decided to hide all links to the rest of my site, and call it quits on the blog entirely. Well…almost. At the 11th hour of my site re-design, I kept a little footnote on my home page that said “For my blog archives, click here…”. 

Why did I chicken out? Well, turns out people were still landing on one of my pages, my post on the Windows 95 Easter egg composition. I realized that people are truly interested in the stories behind the process, and learning about how things get made. And that these stories about creativity and process can be timeless – I wrote that composition over 25 years ago, and some kind folks are still interested.

And apparently search engines thought this was an important post, so at the last minute, I left a link. Why not.

Well, I forgot about the blog again for a while…but there was another really big influence on me that came really shortly after, which made me re-think the idea of a blog again. I read Austin Kleon’s book “Steal Like an Artist”, and then promptly “Show Your Work!”, both of which are incredibly brilliant and inspiring. The latter reinvigorated a fire in me that I always believed when I started this website and blog way back in 2002. I truly maintain that creative individuals should share their work: not to boast or try get followers, but to build a community of people that are interested in similar things. And showing your work can inspire others, and also keep you accountable. 

And I realized – I might just need a blog again. 

So, it became clear to me that it was time for the blog to come back. I’ve decided the focus of this blog will be about my creative pursuits in music – including my process, successes, my failures, rough drafts, ideas, finished products, learnings along the way, and the struggles of making music while in a stage of life that allows so little time to do so. 

And with the blog being back, I anticipate a powerful side effect will keep me accountable to continue to create, and continue to write about it. Progress will be slow, but that’s the first lesson to learn…coming up in the next post.