Comments on: Destination: Z-list

By: Dick Stanley

Dick Stanley — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:59:31 +0000

I rarely spend five minutes on a post, but I believe in keeping them short. I’m sure it shows. My vast audience and marching army of devoted commenters is proof. Nevertheless… I enjoy what little I do and I really have better things to attend to, including a nine-year-old boy.

By: Mark Alger

Mark Alger — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 02:41:55 +0000

As one of Fran’s co-conspirators (but with a blog of my own as well), I concur. If I spent more than an hour a day at it, I’d be fired from my day job or divorcedd or both. My rule is a bit different from y’all’s, though. I figure if I can’t dope out a good statement of what’s on my mind in ten or twenty minutes (for a single post), then my readers won’t be able to either and won’t read it.

By: CGHill

CGHill — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:07:26 +0000

I have a little digital voice recorder for sudden bursts of inspiration out on the road. (And since my current cell phone also has one, I have actual belt-and-suspenders redundancy, which should surprise no one.)

By: Lisa Paul

Lisa Paul — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:02:31 +0000

Ha! Despite your protests, I’m going to accuse you of being extraordinarily nice. Good blogging rules. May I also add the technique of carrying a little moleskin notebook around with you. There is a major amount of wasted time in our lives, from waiting in lines, to being stopped in traffic. I jot down notes and compose posts in my head during these unplanned downtimes. Let’s me dash off a post in about 20 minutes. And I write long posts.

Let me also add, spending significant amounts of time alone in a barn in the middle of the country with Wi-Fi but no TV, radio or reliable phones gives one an awful lot of blogging time.

By: Francis W. Porretto

Francis W. Porretto — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:17:16 +0000

Hm. I put about an hour a day into writing for Eternity Road, on the days that I do write for it. (Since acquiring my Esteemed Co-Conspirators, I've allowed myself to dial it back a bit.) When I feel empty of material -- that is, when nothing of current interest seems worthy of whatever extra illumination I might shed on it -- instead of going to "the trunk" for a topic, I take the day off. I have yet to feel anything akin to burnout, but there've been periods where I felt too exhausted by other responsibilities and stresses to do a proper job with whatever blogging topic I might have. Once again, having a stable of worthy co-contributors has made this a lot easier to bear. And then there are days like today.

By: CT

CT — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:07:52 +0000

3-5 hours per day is extreme, especially when even a lot of A-listers average on more than 1-2 posts a day.

I’d say burnout comes from a combination of getting little/no feedback and exposure, and longer-term, the sense that they’ve said everything they have to say and don’t want to start repeating themselves. Inasmuch as I suffer from both those maladies, nevertheless I’m still permalinking away…

By: fillyjonk

fillyjonk — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:46:24 +0000

Yeah, the three to five hours a day seems like a lot. Of course, I don’t go searching for “cool stuff” unless I find it in the process of searching for some other reason (like research).

I wonder how much of the burnout she refers to also has to do with overly high expectations – the “I can get a book deal out of this!” or “Someday, they will pay me to blog!” and when that doesn’t come to pass for 99% of bloggers, they feel either cheated or like the system’s rigged or something and they burn out. (I know there have been a lot of times when I’ve looked at my little blog and thought, “Why don’t more people read and comment? Why don’t more people link me?” I wound up concluding (perhaps incorrectly) that it was just that I wasn’t very GOOD. Of course that made me unhappy and kind of burnt out. I try to move past that and remind myself that it’s preferable in this world to have a few true friends instead of a semi-anonymous entourage, but still, there are times when the only thing I can say is “it would be nice to be admired.”)