A few days ago, I wrote a post that did well numbers wise and I knew it would.
It was the kind of thing that people like to read whilst also being useful.
I don’t advocate for writing for people as you’ll never find your own voice or style that way. But in my previous post I managed to find the overlap between what I like to write and what you like to read.
That bit is the sweet spot because that way you’re not sacrificing your creativity or your chance to explore.
Time flies when you’re daily blogging.
I’ve written over 300 posts for this site and I’ve manged to not run out of ideas.
If you’d have asked me 300 days ago what I’d be writing about towards the end of 2019 I’d have said ‘I’m not sure’. But something I’ve realised is that each blog post is simply the expansion of a thought and humans have tens of thousands of thoughts a day so I’ll never need to worry about running out of ideas.
And I find that the more I experience, grow and explore the more my perspective shifts and I’m able to expand on things I wrote previously or write them with a more developed mindset.
I also find that because I write each day I’m not so focused on the stats. However, what I do notice is familiar usernames that regularly read my posts and that is something I truly appreciate.
It turns out I’ve been hiding.
I’ve been hiding from the kind of writing that challenges me. I used to think that that meant being more personal and baring my soul.
But I was wrong.
I think there is beauty in being able to write something that not only moves the reader but also the writer.
Not the painful, tortured writer but instead the kind of writing with feeling behind it instead of just words.
It’s hard to find the time to push myself with what I share on The Daily Gemm in-between everything I have going on (and everything I distract myself with). And sometimes I allow myself to be bare minimum because I know I can get away with it.
But I read something beautiful this morning and it moved me. It made me remember just what I love about writing. It got me thinking about how I used to write and how I haven’t pushed myself to explore my writing enough.
I don’t even remember the last time I just sat and wrote without thinking about what I would do with it once it was finished.
I haven’t written a poem in months.
I daydreamed about writing these personal essays about my life yet I rarely write more than a couple hundred words at a time and never get round to even planning the essays.
I’ve been hiding and I didn’t even know it.
If want to improve the user experience of your site get someone to browse through your site and come up with a few points on what could be better.
Or if you’re like me, you randomly decide to browse your own site and instantly find some things worth changing.
So this is really just a heads up to say if you notice things starting to look a little different. If you have any particular feedback on the site that’d be great.
When I started this site I was so focused on creating something simple to showcase daily musings that I didn’t really give thought to the design aspects of the site. In some ways that’s a good thing as I could have gotten so caught up in that aspect of the site that it distracted me from just writing.
However after just over 8 months, I think that now is the right time to make some changes.
And if Instagram is your thing why not follow me @thedailygemm
Sometimes I wonder about the people that read my blog.
How old are you?
What do you do for a living?
Are you into fashion (I am!)?
What do you like about my blog?
What do you want to see more of?
Some of those questions are worth asking more than others but overall I’m not sure that I can say it’s information that I need.
It’s just my curiosity.
Sometimes when we’re working on a task or project we focus too much on things that don’t actually add to the work that we’re doing.
Granted sometimes they do add to the work but if the majority of my effort or time is going into something that is only a small part of the work overall, then I wont end up with the result that I really want.
