DBCII

If We Were Having Coffee… Are You Still There? Edition

If we were having coffee, I might just quote Portal. It’s possible.

I’d also probably tell you about how I started staying home with the Geek Baby this week. It’s maybe going like this. I’d also probably tell you that I’m working on insulation for the house today – so coffee’s about the best thing going.

As my coffee bubbles and pops, I would get pensive. I would want to talk about my future in blogging, I think, in particular.

This here blog started as part of a class, lived on and morphed into a place where I wanted to blog about writing… and then I explored and found that there’s both a lot of people blogging about writing, and not a lot actually blogging what they are writing. Updates, craft, these sorts of things, sure. But the contents, the intellectual property, are squirreled away until ready to be published.

So pretty early the wind was knocked out of the sails of this blog. Then we started Comparative Geeks, and it’s still sailing strong. There’s where I can talk about what I’m up to in life. There’s where I’m habitually and constantly writing. There’s where I have a strong and engaged reader base and social media following and presence. So really, most anything this blog could have served me was taken by Comparative Geeks.

Then along came a Gene’O, and right as he started Sourcerer, and his writing blog, and Diana started Part-Time Monster… they credited Comparative Geeks. And our joint blog, and our consistent posting, and the satellite blog here… it all ended up looking a lot like what Gene’O and Diana set up as well.

So I joined in here with A to Z the following year, and from there tried to keep going with a number of Features to keep me writing and keep this blog rolling. However, keeping up this blog while also contributing on other blogs and running Comparative Geeks and life… one by one, the Features went away. I’ve added this one, I suppose, and kept the Wordless Wednesdays running. I’ve even started a new plan with those.

And the coffee share posts do great. Thanks for coffee, I mean that. I need to read more of them, I usually only find time to read two or three. But the Wordless Wednesdays have really died down, and my sketches have gotten almost no likes. And that leaves me with a lot of thoughts. One, do people genuinely not like my drawing? That I need to know! Although it is practice right now. Two, is it such a departure from what came before that people don’t like it here? Three, has my audience here just died off too much? Four, is this just not the best place for this?

I’m not alone in asking questions similar to this – so is Gene’O, with his personal blog. Basically: Hello? Are you still there? See, I was getting somewhere with that. And I think the answer that both of us have come to is, no. No you’re not. Not here. That’s what the bigger, contributor-helped blogs are for. They’re quite simply better blogs, Sourcerer and Comparative Geeks. And that’s okay.

So with the general success of some of the personal posts on Comparative Geeks (like talking about the Geek Baby), and with the success of things like our Instagram, I feel like the last things I am doing here could be better suited to go over there. That I could share my sketching with a larger audience and get feedback on Instagram. That we could share personal fun stories via coffee posts on Comparative Geeks, and maybe even return to a six-days-a-week schedule like in the Before Times.

What do you think, as my coffee bubbles down? Does this blog still serve any purpose? Would everything I do here be better suited elsewhere? What would you do in this scenario? Or if you’ve been here before… what did you do? And thanks for coffee!