Blogging is like having an aquarium, but without lives at stake.

Let me start at the beginning. You decide to get a fish tank. Why? Because you like fish and you got mad fishy-ideas! You’re ready for the world to see your awesome fish-abilities! You pick out a tank that suits your needs, you get a fish, drop it in your tank, and BAM! You’ve got an aquarium!

You’re excited! You’re bustin’ out mad fishy ideas and next thing you know you’ve got six fish in your tank!

But then you hit a wall.

Well, not so much a wall as a hill; a Hill of the Mind. And suddenly, adding new fish to the tank becomes difficult and unenjoyable. You change tanks thinking maybe a new design will spark your enthusiasm and help you generate new fishy-ideas but it doesn’t. Bottom line: aquarium maintenance -–much like blogging -–is not a joke.

If my blog really were a fish tank my fish would be belly-up in the murkiest water. All summer long my blog felt like a burden.  I’ve been unfocused and then felt guilty for not posting content. To be honest, I read in a How-To-Blog article that if your blog’s not providing a service or information then it’s an online diary. Appalled by this notion, I took a few months to come up with a new game plan. I tried to write posts which would provide a service to readers, but soon I realized I don’t know enough about writing and publishing to be able to drop post after post of knowledge.

After an unproductive summer, I reread my earlier blog posts in the hopes of rekindling my love for blogging and remember why I started a blog in the first place. While these early posts did not provide much guidance there’s an honesty behind them I want to get back to. When providing a service, it’s important to acknowledge what you know as well as what you don’t. I acknowledge that I don’t know a lot, but my experience as a writer working in children’s book publishing is material I want to share and will hopefully be enough for interested readers to learn from; or at least be amused by.

That said, I’m cleaning out my fish tank, plopping in a cool pirate ship, and Frankenstein-ing my fish back to life!

Feel free to check out some of my older posts by clicking here and here!

Also, for all (two) of you Friday Floetry fans interested in seeing more unedited poems inspired by observations from my commute, I will be bringing Friday Floetry back in 2017!

True or False: I am the only person who finds blogging difficult?……. FALSE! Share your biggest blogging obstacles and/or advice on overcoming them in the comments below.