Kind: Articles

traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body

staring at a blank page

I’m not sure how long I’ve been staring. It must have been just a moment or two, yet it felt I had been staring for minutes. The slow change of the colour from white to light amber brought me out of my reverie.

I glanced at the clock to confirm that dusk had fallen. I did not need to look out of the window for validation.

With a start, I stare back again at the screen. And it stares right back at me and its annoyance at me. A single pulsing vertical line blinks at me, and it felt to me that it was pulsing a bit more aggressively, or was it my heart that seemed to be beating in time with that cursor?

With a roll of my wrists followed by a cracking of my knuckles, I set my palm on the keyboard and my fingers assume their starting positions on the keyboard, like sprinters in an Olympic final settling into their blocks.

I give myself a short pep talk, “Let’s get this started.”

And then I freeze… All those words that were roiling through my mind boiled away, all those strings of thoughts that sprung up shrank into nothingness, and emptiness settled in.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been staring at it for. It must have been just a moment or two…

smallest viable audience

Seth Godin’s smallest viable audience seems like an interesting idea to adopt.

Most often, we want our work to reach a wider audience. So we tend to cover all our bases when creating stuff.

When we define the smallest viable audience for our work, we can become better at producing something useful and something the audience can connect to. Being very specific allows us to create with the knowledge that there is someone that our work is tailored to. Think of it as creating bespoke content.

Applied to writing, we can choose who we want to write for. It could be someone you know or don’t know. It could even be a note to your selves (future, present, or past).

So who is your smallest viable audience?

Addendum: I always had an audience taxonomy available on this site for a few years. Though I haven’t explicitly made it visible to readers, it has always been there. You can see an example here: bibliophiles for.

Odyssey Redux

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Here I am again, still trying to make sense of blogging again in the age of social media.

I’ve become dissatisfied with the current state of social media. I’ve been slowly withdrawing from it over the past couple of years. My dissatisfaction with what social media promised at the start and what it has become now is why I’m trying to start writing again on my own site.

The advantage of owning your domain is that it is an eternal sandbox that you can always play with. You can build it up or raze it down to rebuild.

I’m not sure of how long this will remain or when I decide to refresh again. But then again, I’m considering it a new start for the new year and let’s see where this odyssey leads. And I hope I can resist the siren’s call of social media and use this space more than the previous years.