
A mixed personal and blog update here.
Real Life:
has kept me fairly busy the last couple of weeks. We’ve got a new place in a different town lined up and NOW I have to contend with packing everything within a month to get us out of here. No problem. It only took us 15 months to pack for the move out here. *headdesk* So yeah, I’m expecting to not have much free time to blog as I’d like. I’m going to try my best though. I’m really fed up with drama messing with my work here.
The Blog:
I recently wrote about my frustrations in the NSFW Blog, as part of discussing my writers block. It’s similar to the grumbling I’ve done here in the past. After a week or so of pondering the big picture, I’ve decided I need to make some changes:
FIRST; I’m going to start a separate blog for political and social issues. I’m tired of readers dropping here over political stuff, and I want to be able to be a little more open with my feelings and opinions also.
Personally, I’d prefer to just stay in my own little corner of the world and ignore the rest of it, BUT this election has shown me that (Un)real life is just going to keep forcing it’s way in. I have NO illusions that I’m going to make a difference, BUT at least when this life is over I’ll be able to say I made the effort instead of deciding it was too awkward or inconvenient to stand up for what’s right.
Next; I’m going to start writing in my spiritual blog again also, in the hopes it will keep me grounded and remind me of lessons already learned. Being an Empath (or HSP if you’re a complete skeptic in anything beyond the material world) is a PITA when you forget said lessons.
Followers and Following: This has been my massive frustration lately. That’s because I’m putting HUGE amounts of time into networking with other bloggers and it’s NOT paying off the way it (theoretically) should. I’m literally spending a couple hours a day following blogs and responding to notification emails about others’ posts. Here’s just under a month’s email totals for me:

That is with me being less active lately also. I had it go as high as over 7000 once or twice before. It would all be awesome if it was somewhat balanced, but 85% of it is notifications about others’ posts or a like to my reply. Another 10% is “hit and run” likes from people I know never read anything I wrote.
So, I’m going to be slowly and deliberately separating the wheat from the chaff; eliminating followed blogs that have never visited here after initial contact, don’t respond to my comments, never like or comment here, etc… The goal being to focus time on the people and blogs who ARE genuine. I want to spend more time commenting on their stuff and exchanging ideas. The heck with the users.
I’m also really hoping that trimming the fat will also fix the (lack of) notifications problem I have with a few followed accounts that I really like. We shall see.
Working towards a niche: This is one of those things I’ve had to be honest about being a shortcoming in my blogging. I’ve been all over the place with topics and information. Gaming, politics, cooking, etc… Cristian Mihai is right; people like consistency. They don’t want to go to a cooking blog and read about auto repair (to pull two examples out of the air).
To be real, I don’t know if I’ll ever fully get this down to a single specific topic. More likely it’ll end up a broad generalized topic that encompasses some of my more frequently blogged about topics, and lumped together under something like “Modern Living”.
I do know politics is gone. Social issues I may touch on lightly. I’m going to cut WAY back on personal posts also. There’s an adage that nobody wants to hear (or read) your drama day after day. I’ve seen a few people build quite a following that way however. Granted most of them were cute girls that complained about their sex life while flashing cleavage in pics… That’s another rant though.
The bottom line is we’ve all done it. It’s perfectly understandable in small doses also, but too many personal rants start to become psychic vampirism level pleas for attention. I don’t want to be *that* person. It’s also better to do something about problems than complain about them.
As a final note, I’m also going to do my best to work towards getting a daily topics schedule restored for the blog, so people know my food posts are on Monday (as an example from my former schedule).