Welcome back.
After celebrating my sixth year anniversary, I decided it’d be fun to reflect on my whole journey, and share a lesson learned from each of the 6 years. This coincided with the final week of Blaugust: a week dedicated to reflection. It seemed like a perfect fit, and an easy win.
Before I began, I naively thought I’d get all 6 years worth of lessons written in under a thousand words in a single night. However, shortly after I started it became clear that wasn’t going to happen. I clocked in at just under a thousand with the first post, which walked through my first 2 years. We’re now up to the Autumn of 2019, so join me, once again, for another stroll down memory lane, and some kernels of wisdom along the way.
After I departed from Viewport, I made it my mission to try to break away from only writing reviews. Up to this point, the majority of what I’d written were reviews, albeit not particularly good ones. I’d definitely improved from when I’d started, but I still felt like what I was writing was too informational. It felt like I was describing games in the most clinical terms possible. I recognized this, but wasn’t sure how exactly to break away from using the established structure I’d delved for writing reviews. So I did what anyone does when they’re trying to break the mold: I copied other people.
There was no limit to the different things I tried throughout this period. Lists, impressions, analyses, reviews (still), and even posts where I showcased my…unique…artistic style. That last one is of particular note because I received such an overwhelmingly positive response that I decided to spin it off into a several month long feature called Ruining Your Favourite Pokémon.
Ruining Your Favourite Pokémon was one of the best, and worst ideas I’ve ever had. It was a series where I’d asked my followers on Twitter what their favourite Pokémon were, and then I’d draw them just…so horribly. It was meant to elicit a few giggles from people, which is all I really want from most of my artwork. I figured I’d put out a single Tweet, get 3 or 4 responses, do the artwork, have a laugh, and be done with the whole affair.
Unfortunately, Pokémon is something the internet takes very seriously. I think my original Tweet received 25 responses. People I’d never even interacted with before on Twitter were replying to it. I know those are baby numbers for social media, but you have to understand that I was used to getting 2 or 3 likes, and no responses to most of the stuff I tweeted out. The response was far bigger than I’d originally anticipated, which is the whole reason I had to make Ruining Your Favourite Pokémon into a multi-part feature in the first place.
No one knew what they were in for, but the response to the first Ruining Your Favourite Pokémon was fantastic. It was one of my most popular blog posts (at the time), and that gave me that rush of accomplishment you feel whenever you work hard on something, and it actually pans out. Huzzah! I thought I’d finally found some kind of X factor that would help me to maintain, and build up an audience. And so I set to work on the next several posts in the series in between all of the other experimental pieces I’d been writing.
However, it was not to be as each subsequent Ruining Your Favourite Pokémon post seemed to draw less, and less attention. I couldn’t tell you exactly why that was. Loss of interest? Maybe the novelty was only there with the initial shock of it all? I don’t know. What I do know is that putting in so much effort, while simultaneously seeing a drop off in positive feedback really sapped my enthusiasm for the whole thing. This probably wasn’t aided by the fact that I was drawing with a mouse at the time, which made the whole affair incredibly time consuming, and also very taxing on my wrist. I still wanted to see the feature through to the end though – I wasn’t going to just leave it half finished.
This would turn out to be a mistake. By December I’d gotten to the point where I was so burned out by everything that I wrote a post saying I was going to scale things back. I didn’t want to stop blogging, but it felt like I was pouring a lot of effort into it, and wasn’t getting what I wanted out of it.
After several weeks off, I returned to write about a few odd things, but the pace of my posting had slowed considerably. While working on Ruining Your Favourite Pokémon, I’d been posting once a week for 5 months straight. By comparison, I posted about twice a month for the next 3 months. There were absolutely enormous gaps between those posts, and several weeks where I didn’t attempt to write anything.
That’s lesson number 3: take breaks. Blogging is supposed to be fun. It should be a creative outlet, not a death march. If you need a break, you can take a break. Hell, I still do take regular, unscheduled breaks from blogging. It may seem like I post weekly with some degree of consistency, but I don’t. I’ve taken a week off in January, April, May, and July. That’s before I even mention that I took the majority of March of this year off after writing 8 posts in February. We all need time to recharge our batteries. Take the time when you need to recharge yourself.
Well, that story was much more involved than I anticipated. I’m starting to wonder if actually planning this out would have been an intelligent idea. All I’m doing is meandering through my back catalog, and sharing the story which explains a certain behaviour I’ve adopted over the past 6 years.
Either way, thank you for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one.
Frostilyte Writes 