Andrew's View of the Week

It’s been awhile since I wrote one of these and who knows when I’ll do another one.  I’ve been ignoring this blog lately.  Why?  Just stuff.  I’ve been doing a poetry workshop that’s taken a lot of my writing time, Heather and I did a couple of road trips, my brother was in the hospital, the cat was sick — you know life.

And a certain amount of lack of inspiration.  I’ve been doing this blog almost 12 years with about the same kind of content, a few pictures of my woodwork, some jokes, a poem and mostly these personal essay things I do.  I’m running out of topics that fit my vision of what this blog should be within my few self-imposed editorial rules.  Like, I don’t post about religion or politics and other controversial or offensive subjects.  My intent has always been to be light hearted with just the occasional journey into thoughtful stuff.

This blog started with my need to express my thoughts about cancer, some spiritual stuff and in time grew into what I have now.

I’m not really there any more.  Now I’m retired, my health is different and I’ve become more focused on improving my craft and art of writing poetry.  I’d post more of my poems except that I can’t right now.

Let me explain.  The poetry workshop I just finished was attended by some really good poets and a number who have published their work.  Of the twelve poems I wrote for the workshop, feedback is that three of them should be submitted for publication.  I’ve heard that in other workshops I’ve attended, but this time, I’m starting to feel like my poetry is actually achieving a level that I want it to be.  Maybe they’re right and I should.

That means I can’t post those poems here.  In today’s lit magazine landscape, posting a poem in public, like this blog, is considered having published the poem and most poetry markets only want to see unpublished works.  I don’t agree with that, but those are their rules and if you want to be in their publication you have to play by their rules.  That means I can only publish poems here on this blog that have already been published or that I’m never going to publish (other than self-publish, and I’m not good at that).

There are things other than poetry that I am interested in, but I know most of my current blog followers aren’t really into that so any shift in tone or content in this blog means likely losing current readers and finding new ones.  I’ve already noticed a drop in engagement on my blog with fewer likes and comments than I’ve had in the past.  I think part of this drop is due to changes WordPress has been making to the platform and part is that written blogs aren’t as popular as they once were.  Plus, my shift to posting less often has had an impact.

Which leaves me with the question, what to do?  I could just stop writing here and move on to other things (tempting).  I could start doing videos or podcasting — which I’d kind of like to do.  I could start a different blog on a different platform and start over with a different focus for my content.  Or I could just change the focus of this blog and start writing about my Biblical studies or my real thoughts on the last election.

But all of that are questions for another day as the timer just went off and the pizza is ready.