My Life

Why It’s So Damn Difficult to Blog Daily

/ Devon L. Miller / 5 Comments

*Note: I changed the blog title shortly after this post.

I have to say that I had never really intended to blog daily, hence the name Devon’s Not-So-Daily Blog.  No, the name isn’t at all creative.  I know this.  It was one of those things I just slapped down when I realized how incomplete my profile really was, much like the bio blurb on my Twitter profile that reads, “I spent way too long trying to think of something clever to write here.  I gave up.”  I realize, that as a struggling writer (with experience in marketing, advertising, and public relations), these little blurbs may not be the best way to present myself, unless they are taken for self-deprecating humor, as I will claim was intended.  And if the blurbs are not received that way, I can always change them when the time comes.  But I digress.

Part of the reason that I never intended to blog daily is that, in hard truth, my life is just not that interesting.  While I’d like to think my fiction is pretty damn engaging and entertaining (see, friends, I’m not always hard on myself about my work), real life is pretty boring.  I get up, go to work, come home, do some other mundane stuff, and then go to bed so I can get up at the butt crack of dawn and do the same stuff all over again.  Sure, I get some writing done.  I attend social events when they come up.  This very night is game night.  But I question how blog worthy any of that is.

I certainly muse about any number of little life experiences in any given day, but does anybody really care about my theory that you can profile an entire personality based on how a person drives on the interstate?  Maybe someone might if it was based on some scientific fact or some research or experimentation, but it’s not.  It’s really just made up of the mean things I think when some dillhole cuts me off or insists upon driving 55mph in the left lane when the speed limit is 65mph (usually after cutting me off).  It’s much more likely that blog followers will profile my personality based on my obvious lack of tolerance for others who share the road.

Is anyone really interested in yet another opinion post about the pros and cons of social media?  Are there any people out there with burning questions as to why I signed up for Twitter months ago but have still only composed a handful of tweets?

Without the proper dark/supernatural fiction credentials under my belt, does anyone really care what I thought of last week’s episode of The Walking Dead, or last night’s episode of Supernatural? (I will take a moment to say I’m a fan of both.  And now the moment’s over.)

If any of the above interests you, by all means, let me know. If you would like to read something from me not mentioned above, I’ll take requests. Until then, I will leave you with this:

“Wise (wo)men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.” -Plato

Waking Up

/ Devon L. Miller / Leave a comment

It’s been a while.  I have no excuse, but still have the desire to let blog followers know how life in my corner of the Universe has been.

I started a new day job as a technical writer.  I really didn’t like it at first as I wasn’t actually writing a word and, at the time, it didn’t look as though I would be.  Considering that I had been on quite the productive, creative writing roll before starting a new report-here-for-40-hours-a-week-for-money job, I admit that I got more than a little depressed about it.  And for some reason, not getting to write during the day pretty much took the wind out of my sails as far as any writing or blogging I would have decided to do in the evening.  So after my nightly job search was done (because I believed I’d made a horrible mistake in accepting my current job), I put aside the computer and stared dejectedly at the TV; remote in one hand, adult beverage in the other.

Of course, I wasn’t sleeping very well either.  It was the lack of sleep that finally drove me to confront my employers about how in the world they were going to hire a technical writer and not let her write.  I wish I had done this much sooner!  They assured me that I would be writing and possibly even editing soon, and explained why I was not doing so at the time.  Feeling better about everything, I slept like a baby that night (although that probably also had something to do with not sleeping the night before).  A couple of days later, my employers kept their word and I was assigned a real technical writing task.

But even with the problem at hand solved, the pattern of doing nothing with my evenings remained.  If someone had asked me if I was depressed, I’d have said no.  I wasn’t feeling particularly low anymore. In fact, I was feeling something that came close to contentment.  But there was very little difference between depressed me, and what I claimed to be a fully functioning, productive me.

Coming out of the slump felt more like waking up than cheering up. It usually feels this way, whether I “wake up” on my own, or whether I have some metaphorical alarm clock screeching at me.

This time I had the aid of the screeching alarm clock in the form of a submission deadline for a short story contest.  Honestly, part of me expected to go back to sleep after the “final” edits and the submission process were complete.  But I find myself faced with the other stuff I said I was going to accomplish.  I have other submissions to take care of,  a ton of reading to catch up on, a home to clean (because it is–in my opinion–a wreck), not to mention this blog.

Now, if someone could bring me some coffee…