Refresh your energy for writing your same old blogging project.

I have lost count of my freelance writing years but I know I started writing online in 1998, or 1997 if you count the personal online diary. Over this time I have had many highs and lows. There have been periods where I lost my passion, or the enthusiasm wore thin. It's normal.

There will always be great energy and passion for a new project. As time goes on and you explore the ideas you wanted to explore the energy slows down and you begin to sink into the project. It's not that you stop caring but you start using a different energy. You find yourself using a staying power sort of energy.

It's a great time to refresh your enthusiasm. You might find something new, you might be impulsive and make a change or you might close down the project. If you really want to. But, that's a shame when there are other options.

Look for inspiration in sites for writers.

Update: November, 2021. Sites for writers come and go. The links I had here from 2013, are gone.

Seven Ways to Love Blogging Again

You can find a new side interest, generate new ideas, combine ideas and so on until you have given your self a revamped project to work with. For instance a fashion blogger could write about lingerie instead of trying to fill the niche for all women's fashion. Or, the same fashion blogger could include pet fashion which matches or compliments their owner's fashion choices.

Change something of the administration and inner workings of your blog/ site. Try something other than Blogger or WordPress. (Did you even know there are other choices?)

• Blogger
• b2evolution
• ClassicPress
• Tumblr
• Drupal
• Joomla
• FlatPress

Add a new element. Try building a web directory with your links instead of leaving them in the standard blogroll. Try Link Library, a free plugin which works with WordPress. There are other ways to create a directory of links but this is the best of those I have experimented with. Of course you can use the tags, labels and categories with your blog to create a directory within each post.

A web directory isn't for everyone. Your strong point may be social networking and being social in general. Start doing more with Twitter, Facebook and look for forums and online groups in your niche or a related topic. Be social, get outside your box and bring new ideas and perspective back when you start writing your blog again.

Try a new blogging/ writing format. Become a content curator - link to great content you find in your niche, write enough to explain why you are linking to it and don't forget to give credit to the original writer. This could even be a weekly thing, like a round up post. List links and posts you've read during the week as a weekend (or which ever day you choose) blog post.

Learn a new skill. Start drawing your own images to add as illustrations for your posts. Or try another art form like your own digital photos, ASCII art and all kinds of alter art such as collage. Anything you can turn into an image file and add to your blog will work.

Take a break, temporarily. Don't write for a week, not even a list of post ideas. Hold out on yourself. This gives your passion time to rebuild.

My own experience as a lost, blocked and downtrodden writer.

I've been writing my current, main blog since 2004. It began as part of another site, now gone. I kept it going on my own. Having a schedule helps me with self-discipline. Though I was making weekly posts at first, I stepped up and went daily a couple of years ago. The schedule is good, the discipline is good too but... having a tighter posting schedule accelerates burnout.

So, in the years I've been publishing, editing and writing online I have had writer's block and burnout more than a handful of times. I pull myself out each time. I will this time too. One or more of the ideas I've written about above worked for me. After all, I'm still here, writing, editing and publishing online.

I've decided to gradually pull my content off HubPages. With so many posts being no-indexed (by HubPages) it seems I could make more money hosting them myself running Adsense/ Amazon and keeping 100% of the revenue. I already have the blogs up and in need of content. In trying to write for the networks and have some active presence in their communities I have spread myself thin.

You may think there is no point to ever writing for a network. But, I have liked being part of the writing networks for the community, the networking and the sharing of ideas. Also, for the writing discipline of knowing I'm sticking to a schedule and meeting goals not entirely of my own making. Being our own boss is only good when you have a fairly pushy boss.

At HubPages though, the content scraping was pretty much the last straw.  I found two of my posts stolen and even though I sent a DMCA it is just a joke, a waste of time. It's too easy to ignore an email which the writer can't afford to back up with legal fees.

It would be nice if HubPages gave us some support with content scraping/ theft. At the very least, find a way to prevent it. But, they don't seem to be working on anything like that. In the forum they have said it is our content and our problem. However, the way I see it, it is their network and thus they should be offering some support to the writers who write and bring traffic which HubPages profits from.

Anyway, I've been feeling discouraged and decided it was time for a change.

How will writing networks like HubPages, Suite101, About.com and the others fare over the next few years? There have been many changes in the past ten or so years since writing networks began. Some call them content farms.

I've been reading that blogging is dead. Some of these predictions are just for self promotion, trying to write something that will go viral. However, some of them are based on real perception; watching the trends and having an understanding of the way things work.

The individual publishers of blogging are not dead. Social media gurus, content curators and general blog publishers (notice publishers, not writers) are  still linking to content. So content is still out there. It has been getting harder to find quality content versus content which is carelessly written, very repetitive, unoriginal and usually has nothing to say, like a political speech with a lot of words to fill space but actually say nothing.

The web has become commercial versus creative. Less content (which is both unique and freely given) is being created.

Quality of writing has suffered as people really don't care what they publish. It isn't meant to be fit for human consumption and doesn't really need spelling, grammar, punctuation or comprehension in order to be good for SEO (search engine optimization). Quality of the content itself has also suffered, for years. Writing which has a point of view, writing which actually has something to say rather than regurgitating every other article, post and opinion online has been getting harder to find.

As a writer looking at writing jobs being offered I am seeing a big emphasis on social media and keywords. The quality of the content isn't high on the list of importance. So the people writing this stuff, don't need to know how to write -  if they can sell the stuff they write. They sell themselves as content marketers and those are the people who then write for the site.

It isn't the individual blog but the individual writer which makes the content people want to link to.

The bigger/ popular blogs may have hired writers but even the hired writers are writing the content the publishers want to sell. They are often writing for keywords, better SEO practices and Google (even though Google is a bot, not the reading public).

This is pretty much why people have started claiming blogging is dead. Commercial blogging has caused most blog content to be meaningless, just repetitive drool you could find on a lot of other blogs. Very few blogs still post original, valuable content without turning it into an ebook (or some other format) which they sell rather than distribute freely.

Web publishing can not exist in a vacuum where the creative spark is sucked dry.

The people who do still publish original content are having it scraped/ stolen until they become too discouraged to continue publishing. Some quit, some give in and write the stuff that sells and some continue to write but they stop distributing it freely. Making the content for pay then gives them some control over having it stolen.

Not all content you pay for is worth paying for, of course. The commercial publishers think getting paid for an ebook full of nothing useful is a great idea.  Rewrite the same old stuff, hire writers to bang out something with enough words and you can offer up an ebook. Market it the right way and pull in the sales.

Ironic (and sad) how the Internet is eating itself, like an ouroboros (the snake eating it's own tail).

Here's the entire 30 Day Blog Challenge list.

I'm slowly, very slowly, getting through this list (like it's taking me months!).  If you want to join me, let me know and I'll post a link to your blog.

Day 1: List 10 random facts about yourself.

Day 2: Describe 3 legitimate fears you have and describe how they became fears.

Day 3: What is the greatest amount of physical pain you have ever endured?

Day 4: List 5 things you would tell your 16 year-old self if you could.

Day 5: What are the 5 things that make you happiest right now?

Day 6: What is the hardest thing you have ever experienced?

Day 7: What is your dream job, and why?

Day 8: What are 3 passions you have?

Day 9: What defines you?

Day 10: Describe your most embarrassing moment.

Day 11: Describe a few of your pet peeves.

Day 12: Describe a typical day in your life.

Day 13: Describe 5 weaknesses you have.

Day 14: Describe 5 strengths you have.

Day 15: If you were an animal, what would you be and why?

Day 16: What are your 5 greatest accomplishments?

Day 17: What is the thing you most wish you were great at?

Day 18: What is the most difficult thing you have had to forgive?

Day 19: If you could live anywhere, where would it be and why?

Day 20: Describe 3 significant memories from your childhood.

Day 21: If you could have 1 superpower, what would it be and what would be the first thing you did with it?

Day 22: Where do you see yourself in 5 years? 10 years? 15 years?

Day 23: List your top 3 hobbies and why you love them.

Day 24: Describe your first job.

Day 25: If you could have dinner with anyone in history, who would it be and what would you eat?

Day 26: What popular notion do you think the world has wrong?

Day 27: What is your favorite part of your body and why?

Day 28: What is your love language?

Day 29: What were your three favorite toys/games as a child?

Day 30: List 5 things you would hope to be remembered for.

via Can I Get Another Bottle of Whine with my morning quiet time?: 30 Day Blog Challenge.

There will always be something special about a hard cover book. I mean, a real hard cover, not what passes for them now in the world of publishing and retail outlets. Those big sized soft cover books will never be hard covers, just cheap stand-ins. It bugs me each time I see them called ‘hard cover’ because there is nothing hard at all about those covers.

I don’t know when I was given my first hard cover book any more. Likely it was from my Grandmother, she was a book person. My Dad’s Mother, people on my Mother’s side of the family aren’t much into reading. They’ve been known for cooking, baking and stealing horses somewhere in the distant past. My Dad’s side were the educated, reading, law abiding sort of people. My Grandmother wrote and self published a few books of her own.

Not surprisingly, the first hard cover books I had were story books, fairy tales and fantasy. I can remember books by Enid Blyton and the series of Katy Did books by Susan Coolidge. Later I would read Nancy Drew. They were only out in hard cover editions then.

I miss holding a real book – the way the spine wouldn’t bend and the pages would fall open differently than any paperback book. Bookmarks suit a hard cover book. They never look so elegant and romantic in a paperback.

Depending on your age, you may remember fixing hard covers, adding a bit of tape to the bookbinding. Or, recovering your hard cover book with a soft cover of some kind which would keep the hard cover from getting messy. Some hard covers were shiny or real leather on the older books. They would show fingerprints if you didn’t give them a temporary paper kind of cover. Now there are only paperback books, the hard covers are gone. Just the word and a few elderly books are all that remain.