Well, it’s a good thing Rachel is awesome and won’t mind that I’m totally stealing her idea… ’cause I am. 😀
Ah, hang on, backtracking a bit:
“Quick Takes” are actually, as far as I know, Rachel’s and my mutual boss’s idea. To fill in the dead air between the longer “proper” weekly(ish) posts on his blog, we typically post a few Quick Takes over the course of the week, usually short responses to other bloggers’ posts (that we also post as comments on the originals).
Rachel adopted the concept for her own blog, but with a twist: not responses or one-offs, rather, sometimes instead of a regular “full length” post on one general idea/theme, she’ll put up a “7 Quick Takes” post, containing seven sort-of mini-posts on whatever seven things are on her mind / going on in her life that week!
Now, I realized, that’s perfect for me. See, as all 4 of you who read this sucker have probably noticed, I’m not exactly the world’s most consistent blogger. >.< I'll be all gung-ho about it for a while, but then silly things like work and even – *gasp* – actually occasionally having a life will keep me from writing for a while, and it flatlines. But the real blog killer isn't lack of time, or even lack of motivation (usually), but lack of inspiration. Scratch that, no, that's not really it either. It’s lack of a single item of inspiration that overwhelms the rest of the inspiration-bits flitting about my head. I always have things I want to write about or share with the interwebs, but I only very occasionally have a thing that I am sufficiently compelled to and have enough to say and think would be interesting enough reading to devote a whole post to. And while (clearly), I could set to rambling and make words on any gorram thing, I can never choose from amongst the 17 half-baked talking points taking up residence in my skull at any given time.
So I choose none, and that’s just stupid. And then I spend the first bit of the eventual post-gap post apologizing for the gap and swearing I’ll be better about it (which we all know just isn’t true), which is even more stupid and pointless.
I’ve tried trying to convince myself that there’s no minimum length for a blog post. I can, and on occasion have, posted very short posts, sometimes nearly tweetable. But I just don’t like it, most of the time. It feels like when somebody tells you they need to tell you something, but not here, drags you down five hallways past numerous perfectly acceptable places to have a private conversation, sits you down, and tells you something like, “I saw your mother in the grocery store last week!” or “You have a hair on your shoulder.” I’d rather not be that person. 😛
BUT. Seven little tidbits of news? That’s more… conversation-esque. Granted, kind of a weird, one-sided conversation, so maybe more like a letter, but still! People like letters. (I like letters. Let’s be penpals?) Seven (or otherwise several) little postlets in one post is great, because I don’t have to come up with a whole post-worth of interesting things to say about any one idea, and I don’t have to prune the idea-sprigs quite so violently!
Well, uh, now that I’ve rambled an ranted an intro long enough to actually be a decent blog post, I think I’ll save the actual Quick Takes for tomorrow or later this week! (I can’t remember what most of them were going to be anyway…) So in the meantime… uh… here, have a random sheep doodle:
