So this is the two year anniversary of Exit Within. I can hardly believe I managed to blog almost once a week for two years. I can believe even less that there are some of you out there who have read just about all of it.
I thought, upon starting, that even if I succeeded in keeping this up, that I certainly would run out of things to talk about in a year or so. But what the heck, I started anyway. And here I am, with more to talk about. Blogging can seem a bit vain, I know. Who asked my opinion on anything? I’m the sort who has to get worked up to handle being in crowds, otherwise I stay pretty quiet and am not the most forthcoming. I do better in small groups. One friend told me he’d never blog because he just knows that in the end it’d be about as embarrassing to look back on as a high school journal or something. I don’t know if that’s been the case for me exactly. I know the broad spectrum of people who check this out every so often: family, friends, other artists I know or don’t, probably a couple of art directors along the way, and a nice helping of strangers who wander here through my website. That tends to keep me in line, more or less.
For those really into reading blogs (I count myself among you), my mostly-weekly schedule is probably annoying. I simply cannot write more often than that, and if I did, there’d be even more of the filler that would make me cringe upon reflection, like my friend would expect. My free time comes in random chunks. Usually I’m up late one night, finished with work, not quite ready to surrender the day to sleep, not quite awake enough to do anything else. These are the nights that the blog starts to take shape. A night like tonight, when I just start writing….
Eventually I find I’ve wandered into 3-4 subjects, so I start chopping and creating separate entries. This multiplication of topics can happen a couple of times until I get each one focused and long enough to call an entry. Then I put them away. In this sense, my entries reproduce through budding. At any one time I may have about 10 blog entries in my “unused” file, in various states of finish. From time to time I’ll open them up again and go over them for stupid mistakes made at 1AM, or to remove residual stupidity that fell from my fingers while yawning.
When it’s that time of the week, if something’s on my mind and I have the time I’ll write and create an entry from scratch and post it. Otherwise, I’ll pop open one of my unused entries, take a last editing stab at it, link it up if it needs links (prior editing may have included finding and adding links to entries), grab images if required, and throw it up. Then it’s back to work. I think my record is a month of no new content; things were pretty busy and I wouldn’t have blogged at all but I had a list of entries to pull from to get me through, and service was uninterrupted. I got to avoid blogging but you still got new content.
Is it a little obsessive to work that way? Maybe but it’s kept this thing going. For instance, I wrote the bulk of this entry in early September!
And that’s how Exit Within works. Onto year 3
