Funny how that works: after postponing the start of this blog for about 1 ½ years, I have now been blogging again for four months. It took a couple of weeks for me to get the hang of the whole blogging thing again, because while my previous blogs also had a designated posting day, the topics I blogged about were way more random. In case of “emergency” I just put up an update post about my life. During the brainstorm for this blog however, I decided that I didn’t want to work like that anymore: I wanted categories, themes and a real editorial calendar, like a real magazine.

I of course hadn’t taken into consideration that “having a detailed schedule of what type of post on which topic” is not the same thing as having actually written, let alone translated the post. And I also conveniently forgot that both the writing and the translating always takes 1 ½ times more time than I think (read: wish) it would take. Learning to work with WordPress.org also proved to have a steeper learning curve than I expected, especially seeing I had already worked with WordPress.com for years. The fact that you can change anything in your template to your liking is both an advantage and a disadvantage: it took me a while to get my blog to look exactly like I wanted it to.

What did turn out to be exactly as great as I hoped it would be, was the editorial calendar. Already knowing which article in what category will be posted on which date in August, makes my heart smile. Of course I’m flexible enough to switch things up if needed, but the fact that I have this schedule guiding me, helps me enormously. Because, probably like many other people, I have realised that if I don’t have a kind of deadline, not much writing happens. Not even because I don’t have anything to say, or because I don’t care, but because daily life tends to take up as much space as it can get. “Not now, I have a deadline” is a way better motivator than “I’ll write when I have the time”.

Other reasons for starting this blog were having a place to post interviews again, and to practice writing styles I’m not as good as. Because, and again probably like many other people, I have a tendency to only do things I find easy/easier. Writing is hard enough for me as it is, especially considering both how long and how much I have written throughout my life. Writing reviews however was a disproportionally big chore. I always felt like mine were too much of the “and then this happened/and then that happened”-variety, mixed with a sense of “you had to be there”, so on my previous blog I hardly ever wrote one. So as a challenge to myself I created the “Get out of the house!” category, in which I write about experiences (shows, workshops, exhibitions, and so on) in the outside world. That this also forces me to leave the house on a regular basis, and on top of that avoids situations in which I suddenly realised that I missed that one exhibit I REALLY wanted to go to, is a plus.

So all in all my new blogger life is a good one, and therefore I will continue (at least till the end of this year) to post posts every Wednesday in the categories that basically speak for themselves: in “An opinion” I will give you an opinion, “Interview” is an interview (still looking for two people who want to be interviewed!), in “Get out of the house!” I leave my house and at the end of the month I post a round up of all the things I’ve read/seen/listened to that month that I want to share.

Next Wednesday there will be a post about interpersonal relationships and social media. See you then!