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Well.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I sat down and wrote some blog posts. I’ve been running on scheduled posts… and now I’ve run out.
So I’m raiding the drafts queue. First up, for December 1st, is this post. Yes, I know it’s December 2d now and I’m only a few lines into it.
But I have lots of motivation.
In a startling display of coincidence, Elizabeth Potts Weinstein just published – on December 1st – Making the Commitment to Signposts & Sh*t Piles. Now I don’t know Elizabeth personally, but I am familiar with the types of caves from her previous neck of the woods (Missouri). Missouri caves are similar to Indiana caves: generally cold, generally wet and generally muddy.
After a flash of annoyance (She stole my blog post!), I realized I hadn’t actually finished this article… so let’s get after it.
Now, part of what’s holding me back on this blog post is getting one of the very few pictures of me that exist from college. In this case, I was hoping to obtain a scan of a color slide of me in Primitive Baptist Spring Cave. The picture shows me in a passage 2.5 feet high (at most), and mostly full of cold – Indiana cold – cave water.
Just my head is sticking out of the water.
I look cold.
I was cold.
I also recall I was wearing my brand new custom made 1/4 inch wetsuit that day, and I was helping my friend David Black map the cave. It was a long, slow, cold, wet excursion.
Sometimes, blogging seems exactly the same; a long slog out in the wilderness. Away from family and most of your friends. Toiling away either isolated and alone… or with new friends sharing your passion.
Learning to blog is like caving in that each requires an apprenticeship. You have to learn the basics. You have to practice mastery (more on mastery soon). You have to be willing to show up when others stay home.
Learning to blog is full of wrong turns and dead ends. Following a promising passage for a long way, then having it just end for no reason. Being lost in a maze of apparently identical choices, knowing that most choices suck, but it’s impossible to know which ones suck until you map it out for yourself.
Blogging is like caving, by going deeper than others. By going places no one has ever been before, into uncharted territory.
Making the maps as you go!
Sometimes, going as far as you can, and finding that’s not a good place to be.
Check this out…
Entrance to X29 (Southern Mexico, bottomed in bad air)
To the right is a picture of me with several hundred feet of rope, at the entrance of one he called “X29.” X29 started nicely, went down several shafts, but pinched off about 450 feet below the surface. Adding insult to our hurt feelings… the air at the bottom was really bad.
But you can never tell these things until you go see for yourself.
Sure, you can buy a lot of ebooks and read a lot of blogs to help you on your way. But that’s like looking at a cave map. The map isn’t the territory, and once you’re down in the cave (or building your blog) things just don’t seem how you imagined they would.
But things are as they are, and you have to be open to accepting reality. In caves, reality intrudes, you can’t escape it, you’re under the ground and on your own. In blogging, your reality is shaped by your community. No traffic means no community, and silence is more powerful than shouting.
What’s your reality? Are you achieving what you intend with your blogging? Do you know why or why not? I bet we have common ground, all of us, if we’re willing to share our experiences.
And isn’t that a metaphor for anything that is unique?
For people who have an ordinary business/life/job, there’s already a map. Pretty straightforward.
But for those of us who do something different, we are making our own map as we go. Which means we *never* know what it’s going to look like until we get down there and explore it for ourselves. (and since we are crazy people, we think that is awesome. but it also means we are going to get covered in mud & hit tons of dead ends. that hopefully won’t actually kill us.)
.-= Elizabeth Potts Weinstein´s last blog ..Making the Commitment to Signposts & Sh*t Piles =-.
@Elizabeth – That’s exactly right!
People like us scare the hell out of people following someone else’s map.
.-= Dr WordPress!´s last blog ..DIY WordPress: Creating Sidebars On-the-Fly in WordPress =-.
People like us sometimes scare the hell out of ourselves, too.
Nice pic, looks nice and dirty.
.-= Deacon´s last blog ..Thinking in Layers =-.
@Deacon – eh… naw, X29 was relatively clean. Just a little dry mud in a squeeze between the first and second pits. The rest of it was fairly well washed.
However… I wore the same stuff for two weeks… just beating out clothes against a tree once the mud dried… and some of the other caves we went in were a bit muddier.
.-= Dr WordPress!´s last blog ..DIY WordPress: Creating Sidebars On-the-Fly in WordPress =-.
Spelunking is something I haven’t done since my college days at University Park. Great memories!
Although I believe there are road maps to blogging, many of them are more like general compasses rather than recipes for success. There’s always going to be a level of trial and error. The big difference is when you’re blogging, you can’t die.
.-= Gabe | freebloghelp.com´s last blog ..10 FREE killer WordPress themes in 2009 =-.
@Gabe – “General compass” is a pretty good description.
I’ll stop blogging when you pry my cold, dead fingers from the keyboard etc.
.-= Dr WordPress!´s last blog ..DIY WordPress: Creating Sidebars On-the-Fly in WordPress =-.
Well you have certainly got the knack of picking good titles down to a fine art. I was just about to skip on and go to another blog when I saw the title of this post. Something about it just drew me in. I suppose it is the comparison. I just needed to know how blogs and caves were connected! Smart use of titles!
@Niall – A good title really makes an article… but good titles often take quite a bit of time to invent. This one came easy though. Stop by again, I have a few more killer titles lurking in my drafts queue.
.-= Dr WordPress!´s last blog ..DIY WordPress: Creating Sidebars On-the-Fly in WordPress =-.
Reading this post makes me smile – I’m with Elizabeth – I’m making my map as I go. I never intended to actually blog (and had my website for six months before I even realized it was an option).
I’m not blogging to make money, more to get additional traffic to my site and hopefully, eventually turn some of the readers into clients.
I will say that as I’ve been learning more (from so many great people like yourself) I realize this blogging community is a tad different than my Twitter community.
Michelle
.-= Michelle Mangen´s last blog ..20 #WordPress Plugins I would die without! =-.
@Michelle – From what I can tell, you’re definitely a twitter rock star!
I think you’ll find a lot of the principles translate directly to blogging. Basically, find a way to add value, then do as much of that as you can.
Taking the cave analogy further: each business is as unique as each cave. They share similar characteristics, but go in different directions.
.-= Dr WordPress!´s last blog ..DIY WordPress: Creating Sidebars On-the-Fly in WordPress =-.
Dave – you are right about that – we all share similar characteristics but go in different directions based on our skills and passions.
.-= Michelle Mangen´s last blog ..20 #WordPress Plugins I would die without! =-.
Well, I set a goal of 1000 subscribers after a year and have got about 400 after 9 months so my target still isn’t blown and I thought it was a stiff one. Of course if I could go back to the first step there are things I would have done differently but we do learn from experience. I hope so anyway:)
@Michelle – :)
@Annabel – That is a pretty stiff target! Getting the first 1000 is hardest I’ve been told. The second 1000 supposedly comes faster.
.-= Dr WordPress!´s last blog ..Playing The Host: A Quick Intro to WordPress MU =-.