Blaugust is hard. Blapril is arguably harder. After all, you’ll need one extra post in thirty days!
For the past couple of days, I’ve been struggling with blog posts. At first, I thought it was the topics that I’ve chosen – I mean, I’ve got twenty drafts sitting there and none are particularly finished. But then I realised that some of my rather finished drafts are just too short. And hence, I found the reason why I’m not good at creating posts right now:
I set myself a goal of writing two posts per day in April… On every day… BUT I also always write up posts with about 1000 to 1300 words, so naturally, I wouldn’t be satisfied if a post would turn out shorter than that… I guess 700 words still work… but having a post with only 200 words is really short compared to everything else and thus I’d feel bad about it as I’d feel like I’m shit posting and hence cheating in Blaugust.
But then I sat down and saw that I got tagged in a post by Naithinm, a post in which he has written a review on Regions of Ruin (a game I would not have recommended a while ago but it got updated heavily, so it probably is recommendable nowadays… we’ll see). His post was inspired by Krikket’s idea of showing some love to Indie Devs and reviewing games from itch.io (which is something that I planned on doing anyways especially as I’ve been playing a lot of Catlateral Damage lately) but I kind of ended up not doing it as I’d often edit the posts and then I’d end up with plenty of short posts, which I wasn’t really satisfied with and uh… well, here I am.
After I read through Krikket’s post, I realised that other bloggers are actually posting normal shorter posts like that with only 200 to 300 words, too.
Now, I’m not other bloggers… but at the same time, I’m stressing way too much over a “challenge” of sorts with no word limitation or word count requirement. And that’s not needed. Especially as I don’t have a ritual right now to deal with stress, I shouldn’t stress over unnecessary small things like that. Therefore, the next few posts should be a lot better and carefree – after all, we’ve nearly hit the Rainbow Goal and we don’t need to stress about the 31 posts.
But I guess that’s it for today’s post. I still need to create a second for yesterday (Monday) and today (Tuesday) but I’ve got something in mind for that and I’ll have to work on it tomorrow on top of two extra posts for tomorrow (Wednesday). Ah, yikes.
Anyways, have a nice time!
Cheers!
Indiecator 
I am one of those bloggers that pays absolutely zero attention to word count – I try to make my posts exactly as long as they need to be to say whatever it is I think I have to say at any given time.
…. of course, I do only the barest amount of revision as well, so maybe I’m not the example you want to hold up there.
Blogging for me needs to be not another chore, but rather something I do because I want to, or I’ll resent the hell out of it. I’ve done a blog project with strict structure in the past, and ooooh boy, did I hate that project some days.
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Agree.
But like Krikket; I also do the barest amount of revision and that frequently shows through. But if I went overboard with this or anything else that turns blogging into too much of a chore I’d rather quickly find reasons to be doing anything else.
I mean… Already it takes away from gaming time. ;)
If you end up playing more Regions of Ruin; I’d be curious what you end up thinking of it. I certainly had a more negative opinion of it starting out than I did after a couple hours in when skills and gear had started to smooth things out though.
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Well, right now it’s turning into a bit of a chore for me, especially with all the procrastination I’m doing at the moment and the blog posts that still need to come out for today (two), yesterday (one) and Monday (one). Yikes.
So instead, I’ll start every post with “Fuck you, this post only has XXX words.” (just kidding)
But I may give less fucks when it’s a post with only three hundred words like my “I hate invisible walls” post or my “I hate scripted fights” post or the “I hate choices that aren’t choices” post. :)
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I tend to think about word count only when I am done, more out of curiosity than anything. That said, I have been trending a bit shorter in length recently. Working from home makes me feel worn out before I even start writing blog posts. But I did manage a 1,700+ word epic for today’s post.
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Well, I just feel like people might think that I’m shitposting and “cheating” during Blaugust by going by super short posts…. but after catching up with a few blapril-days I realised that nobody really writes long posts like I do. Even Peril has posts that are shorter than his usual stuff…. and the shorter posts may be because of the lockdown, home office and the pandemic, so I guess I should just give no fucks regarding the word count either.
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The shortest post I’ve done for Blapril so far is just under 700 words. Most are between 1200 and 1500 words, which is pretty much where i always sit. Every year I say I’m going to write shorter posts but it never happens. Everything I post, almost without exception, feels heavily cut from my perspective. I always have a lot more to say but blog posts aren’t really ideal for real long-form essays.
I never actually do a word count, though. It’s all done by feel and intuition. I just ran a week of posts through an online word counter to get the figures for this comment but otherwise I’d really not have had a very clear idea of actual numbers.
As for whether it’s ok to post short posts – of course it is! Stargrace often posts just one or two sentences, for example. I’d love to be able to do that but I just can’t seem to get the hang of it. A post is as long or as short as it needs to be, true, but somehow all mine seem to need to be a thousand words minimum.
As for blogging being a chore, I have to stop myself from doing it at the moment. With work out of the picture i would happily write blog posts for 8-10 hours a day, every day. Problem is, if I did that I wouldn’t have time to play the games I’m supposed to be blogging about. It’s definitely a case of gaming cutting into the time I;d prefer to spend blogging than the other way round, though.
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