Finding My Way

I’m sure that a lot of you – and, by ‘a lot of you,’ I mean the 3-4 people who read this blog – have realized that I have been delinquent in posting anything new over the past week or so. There’s a reason for that. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about where I want this blog to go, what I want it to be about, and what I want to get out of it. For starters, I remembered that the name of this blog is “Big Dan’s Ramblings.” It is not, as a new reader may think, “Big Dan’s Reposted Sports News.” There’s really no excuse for this lack of originality. Life has simply been hectic lately. My two princesses just turned one year old, I’ve been travelling a lot for work, my back has been bothering me, the softball season has reached the playoff stage, and I’ve been trying to keep up around the house and with some reading. To say that I have a lot on my plate is an understatement (oh, and grad school starts up again at the end of the month). Keeping up with daily posts on a blog has turned out to be a lot more work than I expected.

So, I’ve determined why and how this blog went south, but how do I turn it around?

My original goal was to update this blog daily. I was hoping that, by updating daily, I would garner a following of readers. I was also intending for these daily updates to be a means in which my writing skills would excel. I did pretty good at this goal during the first few days of the relaunch, but quickly found that, without having a backlog of ideas to write about, I ran into tremendous cases of writer’s block. I then decided that writing about the Red Sox games (using internet articles as sources) would be a good way to continue writing and updating daily. This activity turned into simply reposting articles written elsewhere on the internet. I’ve quickly learned that posting articles about the Red Sox, Patriots, or Celtics that other people have written is A) boring and B) counterproductive to my goals. Who wants to read an ESPN or Boston Globe article at some off-the-beaten-path blog? And, quite honestly, how does cutting and pasting (with proper credit, of course) someone else’s work help my writing skills evolve? The answer to the former question is ‘no one’ and the answer to the latter question is ‘it doesn’t.’

So, here’s what’s I propose. I’m not going to update daily. I’m going to aim for 2-3 quality posts per week. They will be original posts by me – Big Dan. They main be about the Red Sox, Patriots, or Celtics. Or they may be about the myriad of other things in my life: family, work, school, cooking, or (if I’m feeling really secure with this blog) original works of fiction. I’m a long way off from that last one however. I’ll also use places on the web like Plinky to give me inspiration on posts. I may find a voice here – a central theme that this blog evolves into a subject matter area for. And I may not. Who knows. I think the best course of action for me is to try to be consistent with my posts while working on quality over quantity. This isn’t to say I won’t post links to great articles on occasion, but they won’t be the main crux of this blog.

So, please, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. Thank you for sticking with me as I find my way.