Sometimes You have to Lower the Bar to Improve Things

Sitting here with a cup of coffee, typing away at Chapter 7 of my Cyclopean Deeps "Under Realms" mini-campaign, my thoughts drifted over to the problems I've been having with this blog. I think I just figured something out.

Really, the hardest part of keeping a running blog isn't the writing, it's thinking up the interesting topics. If you come up with something interesting but you don't really cover the ground very well, or perhaps you miss your own point, that's okay: someone else is likely to pick up the topic, handle it better, and link back to your blog. Even Homer had some places in the Iliad and the Odyssey that didn't really measure up. It's not a catastrophe.

What I've been doing, subconsciously, is rejecting the topics that are of medium interest. If I didn't have some sort of Big Idea, I didn't write at all. That's not what people read blogs for (although the occasional Big Idea increases visitor numbers, especially if it's controversial).

I need to focus on the fact that it's okay to have blog posts that are chatty rather than profound, that can even be stupid sometimes. The willingness to stumble out with a half-baked idea isn't an insult to the readers (provided that it's only occasional) -- it's a sign that you respect the readers enough to post something where they have to connect a few of their own dots. Every so often, a half-baked idea can lead to several awesome ones.