What I Can And Can’t Write

I started writing this post about something else. I was writing about a book I’d been reading and how I gave up today because it was taking more out of me than I was getting from it.

It was about a man who keeps the time at the Bureaux de l’Heure in Brussels. From his office, literally on his watch, all the clocks fall into line or go out of sync. Without this guy, trains wouldn’t meet connections, satellites wouldn’t hook up, cats and dogs living together, etc.

It was worthy, and it was in French and it would have done me a power of good had not been for the fact that it was boring me.

My view is that there are so many things to read that if you something and it doesn’t start working for you in the first seventy pages, then move on. Cut your losses. You’ve lost £7.99 maybe, but you’ve saved some time. There are tons of good books for you out there. Reading a book is a relationship, not a marriage.

Anyway, I’m straying into the exact opposite of the point of I was trying to make in this post. I started writing about why I didn’t like the book, but that wouldn’t have done any good at all, for either of us.

I have come up with a few posts about blogging on here, and this is something else I’ve learned over the last five years or so:

Don’t write the posts you can write, write the ones you can’t not write.

This isn’t a one way conversation. We’re not in 2005 any more. The stream of consciousness was dammed up and there’s a boating lake there now. Most of the people floating around on it are too busy checking their RSS feeds to even realise daily posts ran through what was once a valley.

People use the internet in different ways now and they don’t wait for one blog to update.

Back in the day, bloggers would go on holiday and readers would wait for the next update. And by bloggers I mean me. It was flattering and validating but that’s not how it works anymore. It’s not just you and me now. The party’s still going on but there are people in the kitchen that I don’t even know, no one has touched the coffee and there’s a taxi outside for someone called Jill or Jillson or some such.

Now blogs only exist when they are updated – just because it’s live doesn’t mean it’s broadcasting. It’s always open mic night on the internet but you don’t always have to show up.

What I’ve lost in frequency of updates, readers have gained in variety, because more people are reading more things. And even they are not reading what they can, they’re reading what they can’t not read.