Frozen Peaches is a year old. Here’s six reflections on the last year of blogging!
A Rose by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet
The first thing any new blogger must do is come up with a name. Naming things is my kryptonite: inspiration invariably deserts me at the moment I need it most. I settled on a pun too bad to be worth explaining, and committed to Frozen Peaches. I worried that I'd quickly flame out and fail to keep the blog going. Thankfully, FP is alive and well. If I ever leave it for good, I’ll be happy with what I accomplished.
Throwing at the Wall & Seeing What Sticks
I got into blogging for a few reasons: informing an audience, practicing my writing, and getting thoughts about what’s happening in the news out of my head. Instead, there has been a reverse effect: when presented with issues, my brain now frequently structures my response into an argument for the blog.
When I have some space from courses, I sometimes find myself ready to go in the morning with an idea that I can turn into a couple drafts by dinnertime (even the five-thousand-word Ground Zero Graveyard was dug in a day). This is especially useful when producing articles meant to coincide with anniversaries of historical events, or to quickly follow up on breaking news, like the Samoan democracy crisis or the Capitol riots.
That doesn’t necessarily translate to publishing right away, and I often shelve work to publish later in the year. My ambitions for a twice-a-week publishing schedule haven’t panned out thanks to the demands of uni, and that’s okay. I figured I’d need to maintain a regular publishing schedule in order to stay motivated. As it turns out, I’m keen on continuing to share my thoughts.
Why does the Wikipedia page for “Pandering” Redirect to the Article on Populism? All I Wanted was a Clever Title about Pandering but now I’m Just Stumped 😕
The social media audience I try to advertise to is a pretty wide range, from The Boys™️ from Christ's College, to liberal arts students and debaters at Vic Uni, to other friends from all over. One of my chief concerns was that the balancing act would prove too difficult: I'd end up censoring myself in one way or another, or face backlash from people who I care about.
None of that has happened. It's just a blog where I muse on my own thoughts. It's not that big. I’m still me. However easy it is to get worked up on the internet, especially when it comes to “the trans debate”, I’m still just chatting about ideas and considering them from different perspectives.
The next step from here is to continue pursuing a long-held goal of mine: to keep it simple, stupid. I want to ensure that anybody can understand whatever I'm banging on about, regardless of prior knowledge, attention span, or reading level. Compared to my overly strict editing with my earlier work, cutting out much of the meaning and leaving many an ambiguous sentence, my word limits have recently blown out; GZG and We Have A Term For That: Immigrant Identity are some of my finest articles, but the former is ten times the length of the latter.
Speaking of Flaws in my Writing Processes, I’m Also Really Unsure What Words you’re Supposed to Capitalise in Long Titles
It’s hard to gauge audience preferences beyond obvious extremes: I don’t get a ton of readership and that’s fine by me, nobody messages to complain about anything, I have a couple of ardent fans. One consistent pattern, however, is that articles writing about being trans or “transgender issues” get more reads than any other.
This is an interesting issue, and one I’ll likely discuss in more detail at some point. For now, I’ll say this. On some level, I feel a responsibility to talk about that sort of stuff. Anybody can find dollar-a-dozen political commentary, whereas the average person is unlikely to hear much from openly trans people about being trans. However, I find commenting on content like politics to be far more energizing and fascinating. I talk about trans things because I force myself to, or because idiocy in the media has reached a fever pitch.
The result is lower-quality articles that I’m almost embarrassed to see getting a lot of attention. I consider My Identity to be one of the worst articles on the site for how aimless it is and how it says so little. Going forward, my readability goals include further breaking down the basics of what terms actually mean and refer to. At the same time, I want to analyse how frequently the media and members of the public commit basic grammar and etiquette errors when talking about trans people.
This Is The Part Where I Discuss Getting Pissy
Another issue I’ve discovered from a year of blogging is tone. Commenting on what’s bad in the world tends to result in a negative, pessimistic attitude bleeding through between the sentences. That’s not good! It’s not good mentally for me, it’s not inspiring stuff for readers, and it encourages repetitive thought patterns, rather than variety and imaginativeness. The only consolation is I’m hardly alone in this; it’s well documented as a media-wide issue, particularly on the most severe issues like climate change where a positive spin would carry its own host of problems.
Probably the most surprising part of blogging has been assessing my relationship to the media in general. I’m a two-bit player who doesn’t affect a thing, but I’m still doing the same thing as any op-ed writer, so I now think of myself as part of the media in the context of the blog. This is despite being the sort of person who cringes at the thought of mentioning in casual conversation that I have a blog, or calling myself a blogger.
In general, my attitude towards the media has definitely improved. I was never negative on that institution, save for the worst cases of privacy invasion or deplorable bias. I now feel invested in the positive role it can play in society. Finally, instead of just feeling like an avid reader of the news, I now feel like I’m part of a conversation, even if nobody hears me talking back. It’s basically the healthier version of those people who comment frequently on social media posts. (No disrespect intended.)
Am I Doing This Right? Maybe I Just Need to Write Shorter Titles
Going forward, I have no particular roadmap and am content as is. I’d like to see how much I can get out of giving the blog my all in the holidays. I’ve generally underperformed in producing reviews of books, compared to commentary and analysis on the news, so I’d like to do more than that. There’s also a couple reviews of shows and books in the pipeline. If I can get enough social media engagement, another round of soliciting ideas from followers would also be a good way to go outside my comfort zone and produce what's useful and interesting to readers. As always, get in touch if you want to discuss or propose an article. The biggest lesson of all from running a blog is that I am glad that I have made the choice to blog. To another year!
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