The keyboard of my aging MacBook Pro from early 2015. Still going strong, but perhaps time for a new one.
I write a lot. On my teaching days I usually type around 2000 words of lesson notes for my students over 5 hours of piano lessons. Examining days are even more intense - I estimate that I’ll probably type as much as 3000 words a day when writing exam reports. This is mostly technical, pedagogical writing and is integral to the type of work that I do as a teacher and an RCM examiner.
But at the same time, I like to write as a blogger. The challenge is that this type of writing is all in addition to the words Ichurn out for my regular work, so time needs to be set aside for the additional challenges of writing blog articles regularly. Sometimes I’m exhausted.
Since last summer I’ve found it difficult to focus on my creative blogging outlets. I’ve learned that my writing tends to come in fits and starts and I want to change that. The idea of sitting down regularly to write blog posts has seemed daunting, especially as my own experience in the profession doesn’t lead me towards cut-and-dried opinions on what’s going on.
Lately I’ve ben thinking about how I can return to blogging and what kind of process could make it viable. Maybe not a newsletter this time around. The weekly looming deadline didn’t work well for me and created a lot of tension over time.
For my blogging, planning in general doesn’t work well beyond a few specific writing projects from time to time. The times where blogging worked out best were times when it was largely unplanned and spontaneous, exactly the way that people post on social media.
So as I move forward I aim to be more deliberate about not planning what to do next, beyond a few ideas and subjects. The present-tense bias of this kind of work might allow more organic growth in the kind of stuff I’m interested in writing about without having a concrete plan.