After finishing off the last batch of tag posts I had, I’ve suddenly been given a flurry of new ones. I hope that I don’t sound ungrateful as I always appreciate being tagged from within the community for these sort of posts. While I deliberately go through responding to them slowly, I enjoy using them as a way to kick-start my brain when it is being particularly difficult.

Funnily enough, this isn’t the first time I’ve received the Blogger Recognition Award and last time I also received a nod from AK. If you’re not familiar with his work he writes predominantly about Japanese games and anime on his blog Everything is Bad for You. I am also partial to the occasional post about music, but that might come from AK and I having very similar taste in music. Give the blog a looksie if you haven’t already – the content therein comes highly recommended.

Right, let’s get this show on the road.

  • Thank the blogger that nominated you and give a link to their site.
  • Give a summary of how your blog started.
  • Give two pieces of advice for any new bloggers.
  • Select at least 15 5 other bloggers for this award.

The History of Frostilyte’s Blog

Given the framework of this award I have written about this at length here before. For those of you who wish to read the full summary please do, but for consistency sake I’ll put a short version here.

I started my blog because I needed a place to talk about games. I play a lot of niche titles and finding people to talk about those titles with can sometimes be challenging. Thus I started a blog to share my opinions so they didn’t stay forever locked in the moist recesses of my cranium.

I also had a lot of disdain for how mainstream critics handle sharing their opinions, so that informed a lot of my writing style. I want to be honest, but clear. When I share my opinions I don’t want to make the reader do the leg work to understand where I’m coming from or how I arrived at a specific conclusion. I believe I’ve been reasonably successful in doing this throughout my time blogging.

Advice for New (or not so new) Bloggers

Last time I shared the importance of writing content that you care about as well as pacing one’s self. As with the complete history of my blog you can read that yourself if you’re so inclined. This time, I’d like to share two new lessons I’ve learned over the last several months.

Start Writing

It is so fucking hard to just start writing. You’d think with practice that I’d have gotten used to writing by now, but I still have trouble getting started. And whenever that happens I remind myself to start writing. It doesn’t matter what I write, but I need to start otherwise I’ll continue staring at a blank page.

More often than not, I’ve found that once I start doing something it gets easier to do. The initial push is all it takes to get going. Afterward (a day later) you can review what you’ve written to pull out all the good bits and expand on them or edit them down into an article that is suitable for sharing on your blog. I firmly believe this is a sound strategy for dealing with writer’s block. It’s a lot like swimming. The initial plunge is uncomfortable, but if you go in head first you’ll acclimatize quickly and be off to the races.

Don’t Get Hung-up on Perfection

You ever have those perfect post ideas? Yeah you do. We all do. Have you ever sat down to write them and then nothing came out? Me too.

Don’t ever get hung up on a post idea. I know the idea could sound like the greatest thing ever, but if you can’t write it then stop trying and move onto something else. Similar to my first piece of advice, I believe that the most important step to writing is to actually write. If you are constantly getting hung-up on an idea and can’t write about it then don’t. You don’t have unlimited time and as such you need to spend it working on content instead of listlessly thinking about perfect content you’ll never make.

As an additional piece of advice, if you do write that perfect post idea, but it doesn’t look the way you expected that’s okay too. No one else knows what the idea in your head was. Remember that just because something doesn’t line up with your preconceived notions of what it should be that doesn’t mean it is bad. As creatives we produce a lot of good work that is worth sharing with others. Never let your notions of what something should be hold it back from being what it is.

Nominations

I’m only doing 5 of you because I have more tags coming in the future and I don’t want to tire out my rotating collection of victims.

Emily – Monsterlady’s Diary
Misake – 9 Tailed Kitsune
Pinkie – Pinkie’s Paradise
Nepiki – Nepiki Gaming
Athena – Ambigaming

I hope you found this informative and helpful. Both pieces of advice have been a guiding hand for how I’ve made content for the bulk of 2020, and I thought it pertinent to share my findings. Hopefully others benefit from reading the advice and following it themselves.

Thank you for reading.