A New Year, A belated beginning

Updated 1.31.2014; reformatted 9.19.2015 Well, it's the last day of January and finally I'm sitting down to create new content for this site. As I start this I'm sitting on a plane going to visit my daughter. When I first started this site, she was still in elementary school, and now she's college age. Which probably means that I'm eligible for some sort of award for procrastination.

Defining the problem

It's not that I don't collect ideas for pieces, it's that I don't ever get to putting them down and publishing them. Part of it, I've decided, is fear. Fear that my writing isn't very good or that I don't have anything interesting to say. Both may be the case, however, I think the real reason is that I know that no matter how good the writing might be, it will never be perfect. And I may be wrong, or worse make a silly mistake.

I have a tendency to continue to research well after I've found the answer or formed an opinion. Because I don't want to publish something having missed some obvious piece of information. So rather than risk putting something less than perfect on the web (like that's never happened on any other site) I collect information and links and store them. To that for long enough and the amount of accumulated information is stifling because it's overwhelming.

Potential Solution

This isn't the first time I've done this either. I do it in my professional life (although at one point THIS was supposed to be part of my professional life) as well. At least in that arena I've gotten a bit better at completing projects. And the way I did that was through organization. Basically I built a template and put any information I find into the template when I find it.

That's for offline writing though, although everything is available electronically (of course) the writing is long form and intended by format for offline printing. So it doesn't matter that I collect information for years, I can weave it all into the final (huge) product. Writing for websites is a bit different. No one is giong to read through 200+ pages on a website.

Obviously, as it's my site I could publish some huge manifesto and see if anyone finds it.

No Vows, no promises

I'm not promising anything here in this post. I make resolutions each January 1st, and this year all my resolutions were work related. I've said for years that I wanted to do something on my own with these sites, well, 2014 is the year I want to make that happen. But I've said that previously, in fact, I'm fairly certain I've written that here in past years and made grand plans to publish on a regular schedule. And then life intervenes, nothing gets published.

So rather than grand plans and promises this year, I will simply acknowledge the failure that this site has been, and move forward. I think my first goal will be to work through the backlog of writing that I've begun but not published.

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