External Buzz

June 11, 2009

(This was originally written for my games blog, but I’ve decided to stick it here)

I seem to be falling into this ghastly pattern of writing longer articles at higher frequencies – no wonder I was going to burn out sometime. That time is actually not now. No. No. I’m actually covering my ass quite well, instead I think I’m gravitating towards producing more external content which will inevitably result in less content here. Of course, there is a particular brand of writing which fits this blog’s motif and of course, I’ll continue to pump this flavour of content out almost exclusively on this site – for simple reasons being; I don’t imagine that it would integrate so well with what’s offered externally, ie. on other sites and blogs . That last point saddens me actually. I’ve built up this lust for discussing the merits of a given title. Once I’ve played through X game, exploring X merit of X game is hugely enriching. Unfortunately, pitching more personal, perhaps journal-like writings on games -I haven’t settled on a naming convention yet – doesn’t really fit anywhere but here. I guess this will change with the continued fruition of blogs such as the Retronaut’s blog and the realization that we can actually discuss (even) new games in a personal light and not just those games that we have a nostalgic attachment too. Anyways, I digress!

For the past ten days this thought has been infixed in my mind and I haven’t been able to figure out why the sudden yearn for writing for other publications…until about 3 minutes ago when it all clicked. You see folks, this was the reason I originally started blogging, to write out the answers to my problems. ^_^

My reason is this, I’m craving a bit more polish in my work. I was watching some videos from Australian Problogger phenomena Darren Rowse (it’s been years since I’ve delved into such material) in which he was profiling his blogging work flow, which is incidentally more or less the same as my own – nothing gained then right? Well actually, he mentioned something that piqued my attention. He would write an article or most of an article and stew over the piece for a few days before returning to polish the piece. The downtime between writing intervals allows one’s mind to feast on possible ideas or wording that might not necessarily make its presence while you banging away the piece infront of the computer. The gap ensures much more flavoursome writing as you have the time to gather all your relevant ideas and then later apply those ideas.

I like writing in such a way that I feel pleased with what I’ve written. I uphold this with everything that goes up here and generally proofread each piece about three times before publication. Over the past 2 months, I’ve rarely had the opportunity to leave what I’ve written for more that a few days, usually because I want to stick to this strict 2 day posting schedule I’ve placed upon myself. That’s fine – most of what I post up here is great, and it gets a thorough checking before it goes up. Although I don’t think that the process is allowing me to develop my writing style which is what I ought to be aiming for at the moment. By providing more lead way I can polish my work for the better.

So I guess I subconsciously latched onto the idea that writing externally would force me to be a tougher scrutinizer of my work- which I would now evaluate as true. By writing elsewhere I’m a harsher critic of my work, plus I also get a little more breathing room.

The reason for me writing this is therefore to let you know that I may be slowing down a little. I don’t think it’s a big deal since I’ve basically sped up in the last few months anyways. I also need some time to read a couple of books too, in particular Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins, China – A Handbook in Chinese Intercultural Communication by Jean Brick as well as the two volumes of Gamespite that arrived today, some e-zines, print magazines and maybe some of Dahl’s short stories collection. It’s worth mentioning since I actually wish to write about a number of these here, once I have the time to process them. Anyways, that’s just a bit of a heads up. Any work that I post elsewhere will also been linked to here, so no loss really, just wanted to share my ideas and now was the best time to do that.

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