Saturday, April 4, 2015

skvirrelface and the blogging heydays

I was scrubbing through the archives because I wasn't feeling like drawing anything, and then I came across this. 






The file is titled skvirrelface.png, which of course makes no sense at all. But I really like it! It's from 2013 and I remember how frustrated I was that day, because, well, that happened. It's just a bad drawing. But now I like it, it's got a lot of character. You can tell I was sort of polishing a turd with that one eye that I rendered in, hopelessly trying to make something out of it.

I checked with my old blog entries to see if I had uploaded this, but of course I had not. I really was more serious back then. At that time, this was just a failure, but now, perhaps, I've grown less critical of my art, for better and for worse. My blog was also a bit different back then, and there was no real shortage of things to write about.

I think my peak blogging days came in early 2013. Not a lot happened on the blog in late 2013, and 2014 was pretty quiet, but early 2013, man, that was what it was about. Just looking back at the titles of those entries makes me all nostalgic. Reading back. The art leaned more toward dedicated work. While the texts weren't maybe written as well as I remember, there's real inspiration behind them. I'm not sure if that carries over to you as readers, but I remember it fondly as a writer. I had a streak of writing about subjects that I felt were really interesting.

There are some pretty cliche entries to be found, but the important thing wasn't that they were good, it was that I thought they were good. I was confident as a writer, and stayed up late drawing. My readership numbers also peaked in March, 2013. I can't say for sure if I had more readers because I was writing so well, or I wrote better because I was motivated by the support. A bit of both, probably. And I wrote more often, too. About 6 entries per month.

In the later half of 2013, I wrote a lot less because I was occupied with other things. Which was a mistake. I should definitely have put some more time in the blog, in retrospect. The readership bubble burst pretty quickly as the flow of blog posts declined to a monthly basis. And by the time that happens, it's hard to pick a blog up again, because your readers are gone! Like I've established before in various contexts, consistency generally seems to be paramount to success.

2 comments:

  1. I had my start much later than you, but I can definitely relate. Also, I have to agree that your peak was indeed in early 2013. But who knows? You may get there again. For instance, you've definitely picked up the pace now!

    I think I'll keep my own entries to a monthly basis; I still have the same readership as earlier, and frankly, I find it hard to gather the inspiration/motivation to write about new and interesting things every week at this point in my life.

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    Replies
    1. I have the same problem with inspiration. Generally, if I just manage to put myself in front of the PC to write something, I will, and it probably won't suck, but it won't be great either without that inspiration.

      But I think once you get into writing more often, you also enter a mindset where you sort of inspire yourself. You lower the bar for yourself to be successfully inspired, thus inspiration is easier to come by. But I think it takes more than 3-4 entries per month to get to that stage. And to get the motivation to write that often, you need to build up that writers confidence, because it's hard to keep up writing often if you feel like no one wants to read what you're writing.

      It really is an uphill journey to once again try to get into blogging! Hopefully that changes at some point.

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