Well hello blog, it’s been a long time.
I haven’t been sure what to do with you. I haven’t really known what direction to take you in for a while. I even considered deleting everything and starting over. You see, I had this idea that I wanted to turn my blog into a business. And I was told that to have successful money making blog, it had to have a “niche”. I suppose that’s just another way of saying it has to have a purpose that is immediately clear and useful to other people.
And I had to be honest with myself. In the Limelight doesn’t really have that. Because it is above all else a personal blog. That’s what it started as, and that’s all it was ever intended to be. I had to stop, and really think about why this blog exists. It took a long time. Finally it dawned on me:
I’m not famous, so I made this blog.
That is why this blog exists.
It’s my outlet for self-expression. My attempts to shoehorn it into a category have been foolhardy. It’s not a personal development blog, though it does contain personal development articles. It’s not a photo blog, though it does contain my photos. It’s certainly not a business blog, or a finance blog, though I’ve written about those topics too. This blog has no “niche”, no target demographic, It’s just one big fat ego trip for yours truly. And realizing that has been immensely liberating.
You see, I have been cheating myself, and the readers I do have, by trying to (and failing) to focus this blog on a specific topic and make it about other people when it’s really about me. I have not written about things I otherwise might have written about because they didn’t fit the “theme”.
And I like writing. I like it a lot. I don’t think I am the most eloquent writer in the world, but I’d like to think I am at least somewhat competent. More importantly, I am an opinionated bastard who very rarely lacks for something to say. It’s really time I started saying it.
I came to realize this after becoming involved in a heated battle of words and wit (not wits, as I don’t mind saying I was the only one in possession of any) on Twitter. I realized just how impossible it is on that medium to express your views and get your points across with any nuance or clarity. It’s frustrating, to tell you the truth. Twitter is a fantastic tool, and I enjoy it very much, but as a tool for self-expression or intelligent discourse, it is severely lacking.
It was after reflecting on that episode, and a couple of other less explosive ones that followed in the days after that I realized that I was absolutely desperate for an outlet, and that Twitter just wasn’t cutting it. I was coming across like a hot-headed asshole, and while I am most definitely hot-headed, I am not an asshole. But that’s what happens when you try to cram complex thoughts and observations into 140 characters or less.
I realized I needed to start blogging again. This time unconstrained by arbitrary and unnecessary “focus”.
I almost did something really stupid…
In my quest to make this blog into something it was never meant to be, I almost made a colossally stupid mistake.