A little before Christmas, I told you that I wouldn’t be posting my regular book reviews or weekend reads any more. I gave a vague promise of “plans” for my blog, but didn’t really explain myself. In this post, I’d like to write a little more about my intentions.

But first, of course, it is only polite for me to wish you a happy new year!

http://youtu.be/JuxCfgynbTg

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had a number of fairly long-running ‘projects’ – in the loosest possible sense of the word – on this site. I’ve had book reviews, photo series, weekend reads, and a few others besides. My mum particularly liked “photo-a-day” because she said it let her keep an eye on where I was in the country, and what I was up to!

Part of the reason I set all of these up was to give me an impetus to post stuff. A regular posting schedule generates an expectation of something appearing – albeit more, I suspect, in me than in anyone reading this stuff. I doubt anyone sat and hit refresh every Friday until my reading recommendation appeared…!

But over the last few months, this boxing in and categorisation of stuff has started to feel a bit restrictive. I’ve found myself posting more in places other than my own site – places like Facebook, Reddit, and Google Plus. I’ve caught myself thinking ‘this isn’t a website sort of thing’. And, of course, that’s nonsense – this is my own blog, and it’s entirely up to me what I write. I spend much of my professional life writing serious stuff for serious purposes. My blog has always been my writing playground, so it seems silly that I’ve virtually imposed “rules” on myself.

When I started blogging (over a decade ago – gulp), I wrote about all sorts of things, in all sorts of ways, from a personal perspective. It was something a little more like ‘journaling’ than anything I post nowadays. Not every post was crafted carefully, and, in retrospect, not every post worked. But it was fun; I wrote things to better understand them, to express frustration or excitement, and just because writing was fun.

So when I said I had new plans for the blog, what I really meant was that I was resurrecting the old plans… in the loosest possible sense of the word ‘plans’. Expect quantity over considered quality. Expect more personal posts on a wider range of topics.

In my experience, when someone posts something like this on their blog, it almost always results in a couple of posts, and then a dearth of content. It’s usually a sign of someone being fed up, and making a last-ditch effort to start again – and that’s more true at this time of year than any other.

I hope that’s not the case here. I hope this is a change that will breathe new life into my blog. But I guess everyone thinks that when they write a post like this. I guess we’ll see what happens.