This week's Weekly Geeks asks how bloggers deal with blogging burnout. You might not know it, but I blog quite a bit: I have a personal blog, a cool-stuff I found blog, a cool-stuff copied from other blogs blog, a kitschy blog, a collectibles blog, and a few others that I write but don't advertise that they're mine, just as venues to write about things on my mind that I don't care to advertise are going on in my mind. Heck, my list of abandoned blogs is just about as long. With all this blogging going on — and a full-time job, to boot — I can accurately say, yes, I get burned out quite a bit.

So, what do I do?

I take the easy route: I stop blogging. Oh, I can't completely abandon all writing, because Collector's Quest pays me to blog, so I better not fall behind there, and something may suddenly strike my fancy and force me to blog despite my embargo. But this blog and The Infomercantile, both of which have some dedicated followers and some high-profile in-links, each has periodic lulls in which nothing happens. The Infomercantile has been pretty much dormant all summer, with some minor exceptions. It's a research-heavy and scanning-heavy blog, which takes a lot of time; when we've got kids, and the weather is nice, and there's a whole big world out there, who wants to sit at the computer and feed photos into a scanner? From the 10th to the 11th, I was in Minot for work, which took a lot out of me, so last week I didn't blog much at all. Frankly, it's not a big concern.

One thing I learned from a public speaking class a few years ago is that when you stop talking, the listeners' brains stop, too. It's a reason to allow yourself a pause without saying "um" or "uh" for fear of having dead space, or freaking out over having to shuffle your notes a second to figure out where you were. Your listeners don't even register the pause: their listening-bone is locked up, waiting for the next word, and time has ceased to move. Eventually people's brains wake up and realize nothing's happened, but that's a good 10, 20 seconds of time for you, as a speaker, to allow yourself some silence to regroup.

Blogs work the same way. If you're cruising along, posting every day or so, and you've got readers who like what you're putting out, a break will not register with them. Give it a few weeks, eventually they will start to realize, "hey, so-and-so hasn't blogged in a while," but even then it probably won't stop them from checking your blog — that anticipation makes the pause insignificant, because once you start blogging again, they'll start back up reading just as they did before. The probloggers who say, "Update daily! Update hourly! Don't stop to pee, blog's gotta be updated!" are working on the high-volume advertiser-friendly kind of blog. They're not trying to attract readers, they're after eyeballs. Doesn't matter who's looking, as long as they're looking. Their traffic drops precipitously when blogging stops, even for a day. That's not the kind of blog I write: when I stop, it doesn't really register to the reader, not enough to lose the reader. A short pause in blogging to cultivate my sanity doesn't hurt a blog, but it helps my writing overall. When I come back to blogging, there's a spring in my step. By spending my days reading books, going to museums, or doing oft-neglected lawncare, my mind is clean and refreshed and ready to come up with new witty and thoughtful ideas to spread wide and far on the internet.

I do have some other tricks, though: to avoid appearing burned-out, I blog ahead. I generally have several posts scheduled out into the future. If I'm good, posting prodigiously, I'll either fit them in and schedule something else for the future, or just move their scheduled date out further. If you completely walk away from the computer for a week, those pending posts will still trickle out, making it look like you only slowed down instead of stopping. I also don't blog on weekends, usually; it's a schedule people understand, but it's almost a third less content than trying to constantly blog. Both of those help mediate the burn-out feeling, because I have some built-in opportunities to stop blogging without having less of a blog.

Labels: blogging, weeklygeeks, writing

This week's WeeklyGeeks offers three discussion options, based on the Shannon Hale's connection between book and review. I'm picking #3.

I haven't been reviewing books for very long, and I tend to put a lot of work into it. I don't transcribe a rough synopsis and assign a numerical rating. I am trying to portray the book in an honest way, so that the person reading my review has a good idea of what to expect. I want to frame a reader's expectations, rather than tell them what to read. I don't want to do a disservice to a good book by recommending it to somebody who wouldn't like it; I once knew a guy who'd look through the newspaper movie reviews and invert the number of stars. If it got one star, he was sure he'd like it, and four stars meant too much talking and artsy crap. I'd rather give people like that a review they can use, whether I'd give it one or four stars.

Anticipating reviewing a book definitely alters how I read; often it happens even before I even crack open the book. I write at a couple different blogs, each with a specific type of content, so I have an idea of where the book is going to be reviewed before I even get a copy of the book. That means I need to think up an angle ahead of time, so I'm not requesting a bunch of review copies that I won't have a good place to review them at. When I actually get the galley, I have to be aware that I need to remember more about the book than I would just reading for fun — I know I'll need to regurgitate what I got out of it sometime in the future. That regurgitation, the writing of the review, doesn't inherently change my opinion of a book, but it does force me to look deeper than I might otherwise have invested in the book. The results of that postmortem analysis, after I would have otherwise left a book behind, has altered my opinion of a book before. Some things you miss unless you stop to really, really think about it.

I wouldn't necessarily say I'm 'rating' the book as I read it, like I said, I'm not assigning stars. I am, however, compiling what my review will contain while I'm reading, but I don't necessarily pick "good" or "bad" descriptors. I try to not frame the book in those polar contexts: while I didn't particularly enjoy reading The Dangerous World of Butterflies, and found a lot of flaws in Uncommon Carriers, I expressed my thoughts in the reviews, but I tried to frame it to help a reader avoid being surprised. If I simply said, "boy, they didn't put a lot of effort into editing Uncommon Carriers, as a book goes, it's crappy", I might discourage someone who might otherwise enjoy it. If I went the other route, amplifying only the good stuff I liked about the book, I'll end up pointing an interested reader in the wrong direction. So, I describe what's good, what's bad, how the two work against each other, and give an overall picture. I am painfully aware that this makes me unblurbable. I'm also aware that it's far more like a college-level book report than I probably need to do, but an author who contacted me a couple months ago said he was referred to me, because I do good reviews. I like to think that's because of how I write my reviews, and I'll probably continue to write that way. I'm doing this as much for myself as for the audience, writing the kind of review I'd like to read, so moving to a blurby, star-laden style probably won't happen.

Labels: reviews, weeklygeeks