My Eyeballs Are Bleeding – And How I Write Thousands of Words Every Week

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

Gordie’s unhappy.

I can’t say I blame him.

He’s breaking into the blogging world, and it’s tough going. He’s not sure if he’ll throw in the towel or not. Personally, I think he just needs to take a few days off, and he’ll be right back with it. And Mike has it right: if you aren’t bleeding from the eyeballs, you’re probably not working it hard enough.

Personally, I think Gordie’s going to be just fine. He may not have that much traffic, but the traffic he has sticks around to join his community. I subscribed to his RSS feed; I’m interested in seeing where he goes with it.

So how do I it?

Crank out thousands of words every week?

Basically, there’s two reasons.

First, I fish in the rain. I don’t think about blogging, I just do it. I learned to surf the same way: just go.

Don’t check the surf conditions…

…get in the car and go surf.

After I started checking the surf conditions, I started making excuses: “Too windy blown out.” or “Not enough swell.” Consequently, I’ve lost a lot of ability. I did better surfing in all conditions, even when it was really crappy and I was the only person in the water.

Blogging is the same sort of thing. I don’t think about it, I just do it.

The second reason is simple…

I’m not actually a “blogger.”

Sure, I tell people I’m a blogger, and I sure write a lot of articles on blogs. But in the end, I’m not really a blogger.

I’m a engineer, surfer dude, aficionado of exotic tropical milkweeds, once-and-future-caver dude, computer programmer, former US Marine, carpenter, occasional rock climber, stairscaper, mentor to friends and acquaintances, all around “good guy” during the day… and a thoroughly bad boy when I go out at night (but I don’t write about that. Here).

Fundamentally, I’m a writer.

All this… stuff… gives me an incredibly rich vein of material to mine for writing. Just writing out that list induced a cascade of article ideas through my brain. And I haven’t had my morning cup of coffee yet.

But there’s more I need to learn, especially about writing. I want to improve the quality of my writing, and that’s going to require more time per article than I’m spending right now. Sure, quantity has it’s own quality, I get that. But taking the game to the next level requires more BS&T.

So if the posting frequency here on Website In A Weekend slows down a bit, it’s not because I’ve run out of ideas (no “brain crack” for me). It’s because I’m amping up elsewhere.

I can assure you my draft queue is still growing.

In fact, it’s gotten too large. I need to shorten it. Recall I’m the “Professor” type blogger. I have a bunch of professor-type articles languishing in Drafts. You can help me unload my drafts queue; which article do you want to read most:

I’ll run this poll until I’m tired of looking at it, then write the article most in demand.

In the meantime, I’m working on my own revenue plan, which I’ll write more about in the near future. Yes, there will be affiliate links. Yes, it’s a good program or I wouldn’t be wasting my time. And no, you don’t have to buy anything to get some really amazing benefits. If you’re willing to put in the work…

But what about you?

Where are you at as a blogger? Are you in The Dip, or have you already come through it? Are or you still in that first flush of productivity? I know there’s a bunch of you lurking out there in my RSS feed… stop reading start writing! Share your story. Give us a link so we can visit you.

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Tagged as: Fishing, Writing