The blog backlog

Unfinished work can be found almost anywhere, and whether the work is paid or unpaid is irrelevant—unfinished work is unfinished work. For example, I have plenty of unfinished projects around the house, which is pretty obvious based on what I’ve said on this blog over the past couple years. However, it also turns out that even this blog has a backlog, with lots of unfinished and unpublished posts. Maybe that goes to prove that such backlogs aren’t less likely to happen when the work is unpaid? Maybe it makes it more likely. In any case, backlogs seem to be just one of those things that can happen to anyone.

For me, the barriers to finishing my household projects are many and varied, and sometimes unique to specific projects. The blog backlog, though, is mostly tied to age-old barriers, shared among them all. This time, though, there are also aspects that are a bit unusual for me.

Not having enough time is one problem, something that’s is actually quite common this time of year—there’s so much going on that it’s easy to simply run out of time. Clearly blogging isn’t the most important thing I need to do on any given day, so publishing new posts isn’t a priority. That’s certainly nothing new.

This year, though, I have a twist on an old problem: Finding the right voice.

In the past, I’ve talked about not wanting to talk about various topics, often relating to US politics, and that sort of thing has remained (particularly my desire to avoid US politics, even though those posts used to be among my most-viewed). The current problem isn’t about not wanting to talk about something, but, rather, not being able to figure out how to talk about it.

I have several posts I’ve been working on for, in some cases, several weeks, and among them are posts that have gone through several different drafts each—all because I can’t find the right way to put something. In some cases it’s been about trying to avoid too much detail dragging down the whole thing, in other cases it ends up that the draft hasn’t conveyed what I was trying to say. I know that’s happened to me in the past, but I can’t remember a time I’ve had so many all at once. It seems to be purely coincidental, but knowing that doesn’t help.

This situation has created a backlog of posts because I have several other nearly-finished posts that I haven’t completed/published because other things have come up, including completely unexpected things (and the linked example needs a follow-up post…).

I clearly won’t force myself to rush through posts, but the backlog is getting big enough that I want to push some through, even while I try to find a way through those posts that stubbornly will not allow themselves to be finished. This means that for the next while, I’ll probably be posting more than usual (meaning, more posts in a day). I want to clear the back-log of posts in part so I can have enough clear headspace when new topics pop-up, especially unexpectedly. And, there are also regular topics I want to talk about, things that relate to specific dates, and the current backlog threatens them, too.

As I’ve always said, I do this blog just because I enjoy doing it, and having a backlog of posts doesn’t change that—if anything, it creates a challenge, and I like challenges. All up, then, it’s just one of those things.