Fresh Start

It dawned on me today that I’ve been writing a blog, in one form or another, for the last 8 years. Initially, I was full of the youthful enthusiasm of someone who had just discovered the medium, I could easily sit down at my Mac and within half an hour have published a new post. Within a few months I had found a number of other bloggers who wrote with a little more quality than I did and with a little more discernment when it came to topics they wrote about. They had built a bit of a larger audience than I had, but with some their encouragement I pushed on regardless. By the time I graduated university in 2007 I had built an audience of around 300 subscribers.

It was a decent number of subscribers, but bore an unfortunate consequence. The number of subscribers caused me to stop enjoying my blog. I wanted to provide value to my readers, say profound things. I felt I needed to bring a focus to my blog in order to do that and I began applying pressure to myself. Eventually falling into the beliefs that the posts I was writing weren’t good enough.

Things dried up and I stopped writing until my blog eventually died.

Since then I’ve been trying to regain the blogging vigour I had when I first started. I just can’t seem to shake the pressure that what I write has to be amazing. I haven’t been able to break the fear of posting to my blog. I’ve even made things more complicated. When I first started blogging, I would just write whatever came into my head. It would get a tag or two and then be posted. But when I started to struggle I began to seek out solutions to make posting easier. I added linked list posts, so I could just post a link and a little bit of commentary. Then I added quotes, and soon after photos. But it never really worked, rather than making things easier, I had really just added a level of complexity that I didn’t need.

When I started working for myself, I thought I would quickly begin blogging again. I hoped I would be able to add another creative outlet, one that I had once found so valuable. The trouble was, I didn’t know what the blog was for. Was it for my business or was it personal. It had my name on the domain but I wanted it to grow so that awareness of my business would grow. Consequently nothing really changed and, despite a few spells of posting links, it’s largely sat dormant.

Starting again

Over the last two months I’ve finally started to use an app that’s been on my iPhone for most of the last two years. I’ve begun to use Day One in a way that has bought me to a place that I want to write. Almost every evening for the last 2 months I’ve written an entry in Day One that has been tagged “3 Things”. Each post consists of 3 things that I’m thankful for from the day that has just passed. Occasionally the entries get an image, sometimes they get expanded on and I add some thoughts about whatever I’m thinking through at the time. One thing that it has helped me with, is finding that I’m starting to enjoy writing again. Starting to want to blog once again.

It’s with this in mind, that I find myself here. Starting again.

I’ve reset my blog. Gone is the archive of posts that are made up largely of links. Gone are the multiple categories and post types along with the complicated theme they needed to look different. Gone are any other bits of cruft that have built up over the years. Instead, posts are now posts, categories don’t exist and posts will likely be tagged. The site structure is simple, there’s the home page and the posts. An archive and an about page will follow at some point, but for now there are just posts. The theme is simple and clean, designed to be read and for any photos in the posts to look good.

In some ways it’s a sad and disappointing move. I’ve deleted an archive of work that has taken a few years to build up. But I needed to take away the burden of expectation, I didn’t want anything to feel like it didn’t fit what had come before it. I didn’t want a barrier to my blog and it felt like my blog itself had become that very thing. So this is the new PhilBowell.com, it’s my blog and if you’ve made it to the end of this post I’d like to say thanks for your time hope to see you again soon.