Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Art Works

You can follow the summer's blog posts here.
You can read my experiences trying to learn to fly, which is here.

What and why I did.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

If I were writing my usual blog post, I would tell you about the dead squirrel I found on the road when I went for a walk, how I got a shovel from the garage and tossed the squirrel in the ditch. I probably would have made some clever comment on the surprised look on the squirrel's face. I might have told you about the crisp and tart crab apple I picked and ate straight from my grandma's tree. In fact, since my last “real” blog post on August 18, I've spent a week housesitting, made written and sketched observations about my friend's psychotic cat, thought venemous thoughts about the neighbors near the house I stayed in, developed a theory on how every person walks around with an invisible asterisk by them, laughed at Drudge asking God to save New Orleans and Bourbon Street, been severely depressed and then severely happy, been offered another job even while I try to extract myself from a job I quit over a month ago...I could have written a lot. But I didn't really want to.

There's a fine line between living life and blogging about it to living life to blog about it.

I have watched many blogs start, stop, get deleted, start again, stop again, change, and continue on in that manner, leaving final eloquent posts explaining why the blog was about to fade away. I suppose this is one of those horrible posts, one of those posts that throws brevity and wit right out the window and makes everyone wish the B-actor would hurry up and die already.

Gradual change in life is fine, I suppose, but there are times to abruptly make some changes.

Regular readers can't be unaware that in the past month or so I have expressed clear frustration with what seemed to be continual treading of water in my life. My blog is sucking up all of my creative writing juices, all of my time that I could be using to paint. All my best ideas are being dumped online instead of written, fine-tuned and turned into something that I can use elsewhere. My blank journals and diaries are suffering, because all my best is going online for people I do not know, people I have never met in the flesh. Though I feel as if I were friends with some, the deception is that I do not really know them. I, ever the loner, the hermit, the shunner of crowds, am alarmed at how easily it is to be sucked into a virtual life and spend hours in front of a computer with people that I have never and will never meet. Why should I let my day be ruined or buoyed by an anonymous email or comment from a person that really has no effect on my life beyond what power I give him or her? Life is too short to police a website because of comments that are either inappropriate or too gushing. I want neither and I want my time back.

I obsessed over stats and hits and links and jockeying for position in the blogosphere. Starting my morning with a dash for the computer, a check of my email to see if “anyone cares” and a quick stat check is foolish. The results vary and mean little and it is destructive in its vapory power to set a day dark or happy based on how many people clicked their mouse or hit “send.”

No. I'm not stopping my blog. But I'm making a change.

All my old posts have been deleted. This was a hard decision because I had determined not to delete anything when I began blogging. I also fretted over the fact that my Google hits would crash out in about a week or two as multiple years worth of countless subjects brought a wide variety of people to my site, some leaving comments or emailing me directly. I will miss the people who stumbled across my old posts via Google, and I will miss the daily hits the old posts brought in. But again, that goes back to poor priorities and how a quick and painful delete is the best way to regroup.

Practical necessity (dwindling space on my host) was only a small part, though it was a reality. Perhaps it was not necessary to make a change in my blog, but it was necessary for me to continue to slough off old things and old ways as I have been doing in other areas of my life. I do not want to remain a pillar of salt. The old posts had to go.

I admit feeling badly about leaving many blogs with dead links now, but so it is. I am working on a book that will feature my old posts, or at least, what I think are my better posts. But except for those posts excerpted in other blogs or in the book, what I have written is gone.

I am going to desperately try to make a change on this blog and in the way I react and interact with the blogosphere. For one thing, most posts won't have comments enabled. The scope and subject matter of my posts will be limited. I won't be doing so many personal stories that seem to bring in piles of email full of self-help advice that I really don't want.

To be honest, I want to make a living and I want my blog and my website to help me out for once instead of pulling everything out of me for free. My blog and stats aren't going to be the first thing I check every day. My focus on my writing and art, though I have loved sharing it with my readers, needs to go now to what it is I have to do in my personal life, in my “profession” as an artist and writer. I will not post every day, and may in fact limit myself to once or twice a week in an effort to force myself to blog with quality instead of quantity.

I have also pruned my blogroll, as you may notice (and will continue to notice as this website continues to be overhauled). This goes hand in hand with making the tough call to have less in life and make what you have count. The blogs that remain on the roll are truly my favorites and are written by bloggers that I either count as friends or have blogs that are out of my usual way of thinking. In other words, I like the challenges they present to my stiffly held ideas and presuppositions. I like those blogs.

In the end, it's not even a big deal. Society won't crumble because of me deleting a few internet files.

The Bible says that a young man without vision will perish. Though I am not a young man, I'm taking that to mean me, too. I'm just trying to get a clear focus on the vision and some things have to go.