Previous readers of the blog know that I am intrigued every time I see a new block collection and want to see what they have to offer. I was looking at a new post tool and it listed all the collections it was compatible with, most of which I had seen. But it listed one called “Kioken Blocks” which I had never heard of, so I wanted to give it a try.
It comes with 19 blocks, and so let’s see how they do on my site…
Accordion: Simple vertical accordion block, click to expand;
Container Row: A common block in the higher-end collections, this gives you a quick layout of one row x multiple columns of different size and proportions. It not only has animation options, it lets you customize the look for five different screen sizes, and lots of tweaks to backgrounds for six different columns;
Divider Plus: This is a REALLY well-done block. It has all the standard separator line options — dots, full width, short distance, stars, etc. But then it offers lines with text (you enter the text, it spaces it between two lines across the page), or an icon between two lines, etc.;
Fancy Buttons: Decent enough tweaks, but major selling feature would be that it allows for some transition animation, although I have no desire for such functionality;
Features: Simple box layout to draw attention to features in parallel columns;
Google Maps: Standard block for inserting a Google map with an API key;
Icon: Standard fare, lets you insert icons, although it will let you do up to 10, which is higher than most;
Image Box: Most collections have an image box, this is one of the few that gives you hover and animation options, plus all the normal tweaking options;
Kinetic Wrapper: Same as most collections “group” or “container” options, with added animation;
Kinetic Posts: Options to show recent posts in different layouts with FIs, but most seemed way too big for the layout, but some different options than most;
Numbers Counter: Simple “count up” block to go up to a user-entered value;
Open Table Form: A good layout if you want to embed an Open Table form for a restaurant booking;
Price Line: A basic box with a spot for a title and a description beside it, and the price right-justified;
Split Headings: I wasn’t sure what this was at first, or why I would care, but it basically allows you to have a multi-line heading without needing line wrap;
Tabs: Very basic block;
Testimonials Carousel: Basic testimonial layouts with image, content description, name, title, all wrapped in a carousel;
Video Box: Designed for Vimeo or YouTube insertion, standard fare; and,
Visual List: If you don’t want to use a table, but you want to arrange some items in a list, how about 40 rows by 6 columns? Well, not really, as it limits you to 40 items overall. So more like up to 40 items spread over up to 6 columns. Still, pretty slick setup if you had a bunch of info to list in a grid.
They are mostly all decently-rendered and designed, with a few standouts. Most of them have an extra animation option, which most block collections do not do. And their extra 19th block is for Kioken Elements which lets you load a lot of pre-designed block patterns, with options to upgrade to pro modes.
A decent collection, but none of them screamed “must-have”. If I had to identify the best three, I would say Divider Plus, Visual List, and Split Headings as all three are relatively unique to Kioken, haven’t seen those in other block collections. Unfortunately, I don’t really need any of them enough to keep the collection around.
So, yesterday I wrote about how I was overwhelmed and had, by default, chosen to break instead of bend (Today I choose to break rather than bend (TIC00048d)). A bunch of things were piling up, and when they overwhelmed me, I dropped.
Today, I’m trying to find a bit healthier way to adjust, but I have to start with a negative. For those who have dipped their toe into my posts about “today I choose”, you know that I’m numbering them, and while the numbers go in regular order, I’ve been adding a “series” letter to the end. Those basically are my Seinfeld tracking for the choices — how many days in a row I can go without breaking the chain. Well, although I did indeed make a choice yesterday, even if by default, it was not a positive choice about how I want to live my life. Which means I have to reset again, going from series “d” to series “e”. Not a big deal for anyone but me, but so far I have:
July 5th to July 12th: 8 days in a row
July 16th to August 6th: 9 days
August 7th to August 18th: 12 days
August 20th to September 7th: 18 days
I’m happy to see the chains getting longer, but whether it is making a difference or not, I haven’t been able to assess yet. Soon, I will.
Anyway, the point is that yesterday was a break, as I said, in more ways than one and today I have to restart the chain with series “e”. And with the restart, my choice fell to looking at something that was not really the cause of my break but rather what failed to mitigate it. Namely, my approach to my website.
I confess…
So, if it isn’t obvious, I love having my own blog. With 1.5M words and almost 1500 posts, I also know that I’m probably in the top 10% of all blogs anywhere for production and unique contributions by a single author: me!
I like wrestling with the words of a given topic, figuring out what I want to say, how I want to say it. Putting my stamp on things. I like the fact that I’m up to about 150-200 hits a day even if most of them are here for my HR guide or astronomy help when I’m blogging about lots of other things. I have almost 200 book reviews on the site, ones that I put time and effort into writing and nuancing. Do they get many hits? Hardly. But I love the process.
But managing the website creates some challenges. I never want to commercialize or monetize my site. It will never have advertising nor likely to have affiliate links (tried that for Amazon for a bit, but I didn’t really like it). I am not trying to turn it into a side hustle for money, I don’t want to offer training courses. Maybe, at some point, I’ll turn my writing into sales products, but that is as far as I want to go. So then the question becomes, “What am I willing to invest in the site to keep it personal?”.
I tried other blogging platforms, I like WordPress. But right now there are three things that would improve my website dramatically, and I’m not doing them. First and foremost, I can improve my search engine optimization. I played with that on the weekend, along with the next two items, and it is part of what messed up my site. I used to use YOAST SEO and forget now why I removed it, I think it was conflicting with something I wanted more, and I tried Rank Math over the last few days. Essentially it prompts you on how to structure your pages, and gives you a score for the page. For example, if one of my key words for the site is book review, then it should appear in the title of my post, I should make sure I use the verb review repeatedly including in the title, I should add it as ALT text to any pictures on the page. A lot of stuff that I have ZERO interest in doing.
Because I realized that while I don’t want Google to block me or anything, I really don’t particularly care where I rank on most things. Most people using my site come to my site for MY site, not because of a google search. I’m not serving the world, a page at a time, most people who find my site are doing so because they are looking for something VERY specific to my site, and on those searches, I rank in the top 10. So why am I trying to kill myself on SEO? It’s an enormous amount of work to switch formats over to match what they want, and some things I tweaked and the system still said “0 points” for my tweak. In short, I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m not willing to invest the time and energy for something that is merely a “nice to have”. It’s not what my site is about.
A second thing that is problematic is my use of tables in a few places. They are NOT, as they say, “mobile-friendly”. But equally, some of my other design choices are not mobile-friendly either. I should be running CDN caching, not local caching, so that a fast site like Amazon AWS can serve my graphics and videos much faster than I, all behind the scenes. But I kind of like having my site keep it local. It’s silly, it’s not efficient, the tweaks are easy to make, and I just don’t want to do it because it goes hand in hand with the third element.
Namely page optimization. In other words, my site is slow to load. The infamous “they” recommend that a load times should be under a second. Some of mine go to 3-4 seconds to load the whole page. That’s NOT because I’m wordy, it’s not about the content, not really. Some of it is the local full size images, sure, but most of it is that I’m running a lot of plugins, a lot of things load every page run, I have a lot of style sheets that are getting called, and my HTML file ends up being quite long. None of them are dreadful, but each one slows the overall page a little bit. I tried running some minify scripts over the last couple of days, combined with better remote caching, and a few other tweaks here and there. I was basically following tips / best practices on how to speed up the front end and back end of the site.
I did accomplish it, things sped up. And I hated the way it looked on the front end. Every time the page loaded, for a quarter second, it looked like some stupid DOS based HTML link page with no formatting. Ugly as sh**. And I would really love to not have it be slow, but I don’t know how to fix that, and honestly, I don’t have the time or energy right now to learn.
Let it go, let it goooooo?
So I took a bit of time today during a break from work to undo all the stuff I had done in the last couple of days to try to improve the load times. I didn’t even really remember them all, so I had to go to the tip list and work my way backward undoing certain things. I hadn’t uninstalled the OLD way of doing things, but I had installed a bunch of new stuff that I had to remove. And then reactivate the old stuff.
Hell, I even considered some nuclear options in there first, like blowing everything off and uploading the content fresh again (more like an export / import situation), and I even was considering switching photo galleries or moving everything to Flickr. It sure would make my life easier in many ways, and Flickr will now let me have videos if I want. Tempting. If Mylio’s direct upload to Flickr was working, I’d be seriously tempted to go that route. But in the end, I reset back to the way it was, no need to go nuclear.
It’s a personal site, it’s mainly for me, and if it runs a bit slow, well, f*** it. At least for now. Maybe in a year or two if I feel like it, I’ll hire someone local to upgrade and optimize the site, basically to clean out a lot of crap that is probably clogging the setup. Which sounds simple, just letting it go, but it really isn’t for me.
Is the issue significant to the site? Yes.
Do I care about the site? Absolutely. It’s my in virtual form.
Do I care enough about this issue RIGHT NOW enough to be screwing up my site? No.
If I had a magic wand, I’d do it. But I don’t, and I have to accept I’m not good enough in WP to figure it out, at least not anytime soon, maybe not ever. I could probably renovate the behind the scenes system, strip the walls back to the studs so to speak, but I’m barely keeping my head up. I can’t let it add to my stress nor can I have it failing to mitigate it. I need the f***ing thing working well enough to use, even if it gives me lousy rankings on speed or search engine optimization. I know generally WHAT needs to be done, but not enough about how.
And I just have to let it go. I want it, sure, but I can’t really have it. Kind of like my observatory problem.
The part that is hard to explain is that to accept it, and to let it go, I have to accept that it is beyond my mental abilities to figure out. I can accept that I’ll never do 4D mathematical modelling, sure, nor calculate rocket trajectories into space, but basic setup of a website with WordPress? That SHOULD be something I can figure out, and it’s just not coming together for me. So I’m setting an upper limit on what I can do. I’m setting an artificial cap on my site that it will be “this good” and no better.
I rarely do that. Maybe it’s arrogance, maybe it’s confidence, maybe it’s naivete, but I like to believe the hype that you can do almost anything you put your mind to, outside of physical realities. But this ain’t one of those situations where I can live that belief. My site is about as good as it is going to get unless I pay someone to fix it.
Which leaves me back where I always am, focusing on the content. I can DO that, at least for now. Long term? If my brain starts to deteriorate to the point I can’t even write, I will likely not be the type to rage against the dying of the light but rather more likely to find a nice hospice in Vermont to end things. That’s the true nuclear option I guess.
For now, I’m in the world of being flexible on my standards and accepting a lower quality outcome than I would like for my website. I don’t really have a choice, but I’ll pretend I’m choosing to accept it.
Today I choose to bend rather than break, and I’ve put my site back to the way it was, even fixing a stupid problem with commenting that I caused on the weekend, thanks to Matt pointing out it wasn’t working. Yay, I fixed a small problem at least!
Today has been a hard day for me. And while I would like to say that I have made the healthy choice to “bend” rather than break under the weight of a bunch of things, the truth is that it feels more like a break.
I have ongoing sinus headaches that are kicking my ass. They’re not severe, they’re not debilitating migraines, they’re not life-crushing. But they are persistent. Some of it is allergies, some of it is being in the basement, some of it is probably just poor health in general. But they’ve been sapping my energy this week. We watched the World’s Toughest Race this week, with Bear Grylls hosting, and that type of show normally inspires me to see what people can do. This week it was more like, “They can do THAT and I feel like I can barely get through the f***ing day without crying.” I’m coping with Tylenol, but I really would like it to stop for a few days and let me sleep better. Or just make it through to evening before it hits. 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. is kind of deadly right now. I’m ending up having to sleep through it instead. This weekend, my head was pounding 2-3 times a day but I managed to keep trucking along. Lots to do, not enough time to do it.
And on the health front, I did something really f***ing stupid about 5 or 6w ago that is going to continue to bite me in the ass for some time. I was at the cottage, Andrea, Jacob and her parents were in the lake, and I was joining them. The lake is pretty shallow, but I jumped off the dock anyway. Nothing REALLY stupid like a dive, I am too heavy to control that well enough to not seriously injure myself, but I thought a simple semi-cannonball would be fine. Nope. I landed fine, but my weight basically took me straight down into a power squat, with the backs of my thighs smacking the backs of my calves.
I didn’t think I was going to be able to get out of the water, it hurt so bad. I thought at first I had torn something big. But it was okay after about 10 minutes, and while tender for the next few days, I thought I had escaped with minor outcomes. However, over the last two weeks or so, it has been tightening up at the back of the calf, about two inches below the knee. Oddly enough, my knee is fine — it normally hurts regularly, but somehow I didn’t damage it, it is just the muscles behind the calf. I’ll give it another week or two, and if it’s not healing or if it’s getting worse, I’ll have to look into it more thoroughly than simply consulting my SIL physio. My two hours in the garage were fine until I went to leave the garage and stepped up into the house. Simple step, but I tend to lead with my right foot and push off with my left, and the left REALLY doesn’t like pushing off when my leg is tired. It lets me know REAL fast. Not anywhere as severe as just after the stupid injury, but just enough to remind me that I’m 52 and fat, I shouldn’t be jumping off anything except the couch to get active. But it is frustrating too.
I’ve been expending a lot of energy to get the house functional again, with the move to the basement, and I’m trying to psych myself into this being a good thing, but my brain is too fast to not see through what I’m doing. I know I’m lying to myself. I don’t want to spend the whole day in the basement with a heater running because it’s cold. I don’t want to spend the next 2-3 months organizing sh**. I’ve been telling myself I’ll be done by October 1st to keep the momentum going and a light on at the end of the tunnel, but if I’m realistic, and today I don’t have much choice, it’s more likely to be January 1st. And that is busting my ass with frustration. I just want to do be done. I’m focusing as much as I can on the great new space for my desks etc., but I know it’s just trying to avoid sour grapes.
The isolation is getting to me too. We managed to go to our sister-in-law’s today, which was nice to visit, but it’s not enough. Maybe I need more random social interaction. Something fun with someone other than Andrea and Jacob. I managed a long conversation by messenger with an old friend on the weekend, and it was reassuring I guess (?) to see others feeling like they are a bit tired of the same housemates being their main social interaction too as well as their dining companions at every meal. If variety is the spice of life, I’m definitely living in a white bread world. Without the white bread. Another bit of frustration on the sandwich.
One way to cope with some things like this is to go for something “big and different”. If you read my blog back in April, you saw me spiral realizing that I couldn’t build an observatory in the backyard while keeping enough room for other functions. It also doesn’t help that Andrea doesn’t really understand that spiral or know how to talk about anything like that, just not her jam. April f***ing sucked, to be honest, and I spiralled hard with no one to really talk to about what I was experiencing and no social outlet to distract myself. I mention my disappointment on not being able to do an observatory because we’re now considering a pool.
I’ve always wanted a pool, but Andrea feels they are too much work, take up too much of the backyard, we wouldn’t likely use it enough, we like going to the cottage in the summer, etc. But we were considering getting a trampoline that would tie up the backyard anyway for fewer usages than a pool, so we asked J what he was more interested in, and I’m not surprised it was a pool. So Andrea is doing research to see how she feels about the options. But I know I can’t get excited about it, we are WAY far away from anything resembling a decision that it is even feasible in our small yard let alone desirable from Andrea’s perspective. And TBH, if I get excited about it, and we can’t do it? I literally can’t go through that roller coaster again, not after the observatory. So I’ll let Andrea lean in on this one and see what we end up with for next year. There’s a consultant that a friend of a friend used to see what was possible, so maybe we’ll have them come over and give us some options. After our conversation with the inlaws today, I suspect it won’t be feasible in our yard, at least not without seriously ripping up part of our existing deck.
Between the observatory, pool, moving my office, the cold basement, all the disorganized chaos right now, I feel like I’m starting to hate our house. I have no desire to move really either, and with the constraints that we have for where we live so that Andrea and Jacob have good transit options, this is probably the best it gets. Andrea would like to maybe downsize when she retires and move closer to the river, and the prices in those areas while staying close to transit are going to seriously f**k with our financial plans. I did some basic research tonight, and we can do it, but only likely through a condo option which pretty much means giving up astronomy (no place to safely store the gear) or having a pretty tiny house for the outrageous prices in those areas. I’ve been planning to retire in 5 years, but if that is the longer-term goal for our living, there’s no way I’ll be able to do that then. I’ll likely have to stay until the 35-year mark to maximize the pension. Another giant box of uncertainty there to file away somewhere.
My normal coping mechanism, an outlet for a combination of creativity, expression and organization is my website. And today it is really pissing me off. Certain things that should work are running really slowly, and I have no idea why. With my frustrations already running high, and being really tired due to bad sleep and staying up too late, I am not thinking straight at all today.
Hell, I even tried to get a pair of headphones working today that don’t seem to work for the microphone part, and I spent almost 45 minutes to get the damn drivers downloaded only to find out it doesn’t recognize the headphones at all. I’m seriously considering some nuclear options on the website tonight, with no guarantees they’ll actually do ANYTHING to solve the speed problem I’m experiencing. I changed something in the settings to compensate and looking at the way the site is loading now? I hate it. Looks like a DOS version for about a second before the real content loads. I don’t even know which change did it so I can undo it. And too many other changes in the last day to simply do a rollback to an earlier backup. I think. At this point, I am too frustrated and tired to be sure of anything.
If I was making the right choices, I would have found ways to bend today. Instead, I let it break me. Which is a choice too. Not a good one, but a choice.
The reorg project has been in full swing for some time, and part of the challenge is the mish-mash of items that are stored in multiple places:
Tools like small hammers or screwdrivers in the garage, in the first-floor alcove near the front door, in the basement where I have my desks now, and in the office upstairs;
Books in the bedroom, office, basement, Jacob’s bedroom, and even the guest room;
My clothes in the bedroom, closet, guest room, and front hall closet;
Housewares / camping items in the laundry room storage, main basement, alcove, garage, and basement;
Astronomy stuff in the alcove, basement and garage;
Sports stuff in the basement and garage;
Power tools mainly in the garage, but a couple of smaller items in various parts of the house;
Movies in the bedroom, basement, laundry room storage, and first floor;
Electrical stuff in the main basement, laundry room storage, and garage;
Video game stuff in the laundry room storage, main basement, and first floor;
Photo books in the office and bedroom;
Games in the office, bedroom, family room, living room, main basement, garage and laundry room storage; and, of course,
Papers in almost every place.
In most cases, that mish-mash made some sense on a case-by-case basis. But since I want to do some purging, it’s kind of hard to purge a collection of screwdrivers, for example, if they’re in three different locations. I pretty much have to put everything close to its final resting place before I can do a proper organized purge.
I have frequently called it a domino problem. For example, organizing some of the housewares and camping stuff is a bit painful when it is in at least two different locations, and moving it from one to the other requires me to move a bunch of other stuff out of the way to make room, which in turn means making room somewhere else for THAT set of items. Dominoes.
But paralysis by domino is a poor excuse / rationale for not being organized. And quite frankly, I don’t have the luxury of some of it anymore, not if I’m going to get my office working and organized properly.
I’ve already made a GIANT dent in the office and basement, Andrea has done a lot of stuff in the family room and toys from the basement to the office storage area, and we’re pretty close to being able to say things are all grouped somewhere. Like, “Okay, this is ALL the audio-visual stuff in the house all in one place, what am I keeping and what am I purging?”. It’s still not going to be easy on some of it to decide to get rid as much as I hope to purge, but regardless, if I’m going to finish by the end of September, there are two giant areas left untouched. I need to dig into them just to figure out what’s there even, beyond the general idea I have already. I still have the first-floor alcove and the garage.
Today, Andrea and I tackled the garage. Most of it was going through about 25 small shoebox-sized plastic tubs that had everything from screwdrivers to drillbits, from Allen keys to tape, and from screws to brackets for shelving. Some of it went GREAT. It was easy to see where things went, easy to group them, easy to dispose of some stuff.
Other areas were not so great. Like, for instance, a bunch of things I have for curtain rods. Which I would LOVE to get rid off, but Andrea and I have at least four or five places in the house where we want to change the existing window coverings. So it seems premature to purge curtain rod holders before we know what we’re doing for those locations.
I also haven’t quite figured out what I’m doing with multiple sets of sockets and wrenches that are all jumbled together. Most are labelled well; some are not labelled at all or worn away. I’m tempted to keep the newest and/or best quality set, and ditch the rest. I have this vision of two small tool bags, one in the garage and one in the house, both relatively identical with a good set of each size of screwdriver, for instance.
But as I said, I need all the sets together in one place to then start dividing them up properly. Today was phase 1 of the garage, and we went through two large shelves of small items. It took about two hours and wiped me out. While it didn’t empty large areas of the garage, it was the major parts that take time since we had to open each little box, sort through it, decide what to keep or purge, and even for the purging, seeing if it was something that Andrea could give away on the local “free” Facebook recycling groups or if it was just garbage. Or even if it was garbage, was it e-waste or chemical or recyclable or just plain garbage? A thousand little decisions and it’s exhausting. The electrical work is going to be worse as most of that will be just me going through it, today I had Andrea helping me decide.
The funny thing is it likely looks worse after we were done with lots of piles of things all over the garage on tables here and there.
Phase 2, which I’ll do sometime in the next two weeks, is also going to be a bit brutal. A lot of “big” things to decide if we’re keeping or not. Tarps that we found useful for x or y purpose, but do we need all of them? Some toys of Jacob’s in the garage … do we keep toys for going to the beach to build sandcastles? Which we haven’t used in 5 years probably? Are we keeping all the balls we have looking forward to maybe having a pool next year to play with them in? Or do we purge them now?
And a giant set of questions for me around what I’m doing with my astro gear. I have an option to build a small enclosed parking area in the garage to put a rolling wagon in that would let me haul all my gear to the backyard relatively easily. But if I take that option, I would keep some nails and screws, plus a bunch of wood, AND I’d have to get rid of the workbench. Or I can try to fit it in where there’s a wardrobe now, maybe even using some of the wood from the wardrobe to build the cover. Or do I scrap the covered idea, and then I can get rid of the fasteners AND the extra wood that is there. I am definitely not going to be building any more shelves, and so I have a bunch of shelving that can be purged. Unless, as I said, I build that astro box. Sigh.
25 days left in September, so it will be crunch time.
And these are not the only things left to do, just some big areas on the list that have to get going so I don’t end up having to repeat purging steps.
Today I choose to tackle the first phase of the garage work, with two other phases to go. We (Andrea and I) made good progress, but there’s still a lot to do.
So my last two posts about choices have been somewhat inter-related. I’m working on a project that I started some 17 years ago. I’m now calling it “A PolyWogg Guide to Music”, just cuz I like naming my projects. And I didn’t want to call it Dave.
The intent is that I will look at the Billboard top 100 list each year, as well as some other songs from the year that maybe didn’t make Billboard’s sales lists, and see what I think “endures” past the year. There are lots of songs I listen to from the 1980s or 90s and think, “How the heck did that chart?”. The song was mildly entertaining, maybe a bit of a riff that was catchy, but after one year, pffft, it was gone.
And back in about 2003, maybe even somewhat earlier, I started looking at the idea of doing every year. I originally thought, maybe I’d start with around 1980. And I did 1980’s list, made some playlists from it, burned some CDs, and I really liked the result. But the more I messed around with it, the more I started to see “missing” links to earlier music. 1980 was an interesting year to start with, as I saw some songs from the tail-end of the disco era, some others starting into the big hair phase, early sounds of what would become things like Miami Vice themes, etc.
At the time, I was just doing it to see if maybe there was a good way to do up killer playlists for myself. Then, as I started to see trends crossing years, the analyst side of me kicked in. Later, I was listening to a couple songs from about 1955, the early days of rock and roll, and a couple of songs were almost post-40s swing, a bit of R&B, and pre-rock.
It’s kind of a thing with me, casting my eyes backward on what came before. I would love to review all the Best Picture Oscar winners, so I started with 1927 and Wings. I want to review some award-winning mysteries, so I start with the first year of the Edgars. For a current project I am doing on astronomy, I’m starting with the first issues of Sky and Telescope from 1941.
For my review of music, the first year for which I have a reliable set of lists of top songs is really 1943. And while there are lists for R&B, soul, country, classical, jazz, etc., I am focusing on the pop and rock charts (often together). But that wasn’t what my “choice” was about today.
Today, I decided to fix a post. Over the last two days, I’ve made choices about ways to do the formatting and layout, or more pointedly, choices about how much time and effort I want to put into getting the formatting and layout right. I wrote the first post 3 or 4 years ago, and reviewed 1943. There were 117 songs in my working list, and I don’t remember how long it took me to go through them. The point isn’t to rush through them, maybe I’ll do 2 songs one day or 20 the next, it is just that I have a list to work from and I can take notes as I go, marking down ratings or even if the song has some sort of audio glitch in the middle and needs to be replaced.
Yet even if I get the formatting right (which I did) and finally decided on a working layout (which I did), the prose was NOT hanging together. The main pieces were fine, but there was something off with the flow. It had always seemed incomplete to me.
You should know something, I guess, about my editing style. I edit as I go. I am not a writer that plunges ahead, does a whole draft and then goes back and fixes things, nor do I write to an outline usually. If I am in THIS paragraph, and I start to take it in a slightly different direction than I was thinking 2 or 3 paragraphs back, I might finish the sentence here, and then go back and tweak that other paragraph before going on. I tend to think of it as my “edit” window is the last three paragraphs. They are constantly in pencil, so to speak, and as I go, I will indeed frequently edit something several rows back.
But this was more than that. I felt like I had no consistent flow, no real message, kind of like I was lacking a storyline or narrative. Which seems silly for a non-fiction piece, until I realized what I was really lacking was my normal voice. I had comments here and there, other facts I dropped in, but what was really missing was “me”.
So I stepped back and did what I used to do at work when reviewing speeches for Ministers when the flow seemed off. I basically wrote a reverse outline of what I wanted to say, and the problem was obvious. I had 2 or 3 pieces that were linked, but I had separated them by several paragraphs, so it was jumping around. An easy fix. But once in the weeds, I let my inner editor go crazy. Lots of places in the piece were expressed a little too casually, while others were more formal. I smoothed them out, made them more consistent, made them more “me”.
I spent way too much time on a few headings, trying them in regular text, then in a table format, as a large header, as a small header, as a header with multiple colours, and finally as medium headers with one colour and some italics for the song names. Then when I got to my final comments, I grouped them in order with a common structure and feel to them, so it makes a better sense of what I was trying to convey about my review methodology. All of which was helping “me be me” in the piece.
Why am I fussing? Because generally speaking, if I do this for every year from 1943 to 2020 and beyond, I want the structure right before I start, as well as the general approach to content. I hesitate to raise it to the level of saying that I want to do a “professional job” of it, not the right nuance, more just that I have pretty high standards and I feel like it finally meets them. Am I going to have any amazing insights into music that will revolutionize the industry? Hell no, I know less about music than most 11-year-old piano students. But I have views about what I think endures and adds to the cultural collective and what should probably remain a footnote.
I spent a LOT of time editing one single post. And while it IS 3500 words, my edit:writing ratio was pretty high for this one. I don’t know if it was really worth it, but I’m pretty happy with the result. A PolyWogg Guide to Music: 1943 – Pop is the first of many posts about music, I hope other people like them too.
