Goals, Dreams, Aspirations

Am continuing to work on blog improvement stuff for Bloggiesta. Today, for the mini-challenge of My Friend Amy, I'm giving thinking more priority than doing.

January is the time for reflection and re-evaluation and re-vision isn't it? I know that one of my issues is to set big goals, complex projects and get overwhelmed. I know about breaking such big projects down into smaller tasks and am even pretty good at doing that. At least as far as making the todo lists.

Sticking to it is another thing altogether.

I also tend to be a serial obsessionist, being totally wrapped up in one thing to the exclusion of all else. My blog tends to reflect that. Currently crochet and video watching has all but pushed out reading and writing. But that is probably going to run its course and I'll be on to something else in time.

Now all the advice regarding blogs needing to be singular in topic and finding a niche and so on had me feeling inadequate and like maybe I should settle on one topic and court an audience accordingly. But the thought of that pretty much sticks a pin in the balloon of my bliss and lets all the joy leak out.

I was going to say 'no pun intended' but on second thought loosing the joy is tantamount to loosing the Joy--aka my self.

And the advice from My Friend Amy was to think about making your blog into the blog you would love to read. I love eclectic blogs and blogs where the blogger at least occasionally puts some of their personal life in so I get a feel for the who behind the opinions. So obviously the niche advice doesn't have to be for everyone.

And there is an organizing theme to it all anyway: Story. I don't say story is my joy for nothing. It is all about story whether the current obsession is books, movies, news, poetry, music, writing, reading, research, jokes, puns, riddles, puzzles, trivia, creativity, dreams, religion or Joy's story. Even the crocheting and needlework is strongly associated with story for me as I've always worked on it as I contemplate one of my own writings and often while listening to music or audio books or watching TV/video. Or gossip at family/friend gatherings.

So I'm thinking, if I'm going to keep posting on whatever aspect of story that has taken my fancy currently the thing I need to do to draw and keep readers is to make navigation easier so they can find which ever topic they are most interested in and ignore the rest. Which is why the main goal I set for this weekend is to change my template to a 3 column. A huge task for me. And scary. But many of the other tasks on my long list are dependent on that one. Some I could do before but they would just have to be tweaked if not redone after the switch.

Maybe managing reader expectations by establishing a routine of sorts so that certain regular themes have assigned days whether or not there is a meme involved. Like Mondays are for sharing my reading plans and accomplishments and musings in Book Journey's 'It's Monday What are You Reading?' and Friday's are for sharing my fiction snippets or musing on the craft of fiction writing in my Friday Forays in Fiction which I let slide for most of a year now. And Sunday's for sharing the variety of ways in which I find bliss, serenity, joy, and contentment in my Sunday Serenity. And so forth.

A third goal to reach for would be to break the lurker habit again. I'd made great strides on that once but have slipped back into it again in the last year.