Seven.

Seven different agoodwriteup blogs I’ve started writing in the last hour and 13 minutes.

They’re all fucking awful. Most begin badly and go downhill from there, and some of them are worse than bad; they’re vanilla.

This is of course typical, because if I only had a random or spare 20 minutes to write a blog for myself at agoodwriteup, I’d somehow create something half-decent that gets pretty well received by people caring to read it, but this evening, with a house all to myself and time very much on my side after life, work, and at least one room in the house has its shit together, I have apparently forgotten how to write – or even how to articulate or construct any semblance of a good idea at all, it seems.

This slump happens in some way to us all, and that’s why I don’t bash blogs out religiously for the sake of boosting my ‘visibility’. I genuinely can’t express how much I can’t stand that word, by the way. Yes, I’ll put out blogs regularly in order to keep up with the pretence that I’m a good writer, and to keep clients off my back after I’ve annoyed the hell out of them about putting their own fresh content out there, but there’s a difference between regularly and religiously. I won’t pressure myself to meet a deadline of a set day or time, and I certainly won’t put out a blog for the sake of it, because ultimately, showcasing something substandard is potentially more damaging than not showcasing anything at all (at least it is to me, as a writer).

I hope I got a similar point to this across when I wrote Bollocks to showing up a few weeks ago, whereby one of my many issues with gurus telling everyone to ‘show up’, ‘be visible’, and pretty much post every time you take a piss, was that it dilutes or at least takes something away from the good stuff we’re all capable of creating.

I’d made notes on my phone over the last few weeks about each of the blogs I’d sat down to write today. They were great ideas, at least in my mind (and I’m usually my own biggest critic). I’d intended to sit down to choose the idea from the list that jumped out at me with the most enthusiasm, and to put my thoughts and ideas together to write something either witty or wonderful, creative or cutting. For whatever reason, it didn’t happen – with any of the options – and so rather than risking my brand by putting out something bland, boring or below par, I wrote this blog instead. I’m aware that this one is still all of those three things, but I hope that it will at least explain to you why it might be a short while before you next see something decent from me on here!

I need to get my focus and my flair back, but in the meantime, I hope this saves anyone else from time wasted at a keyboard anytime they feel they have to hit ‘publish’ for the sake of putting something out there.

I’d always advocate that if you feel like you should be showcasing blogs, but you’re suffering from total lack of time, skill and/or inclination, then you should hire a good copywriter. Today, that good copywriter isn’t me.

I have no idea if people will think that this blog is any good, if it does anything to build my brand, or is inspirational in anyway to help people with their own blogging ‘strategy’, but for anyone who goes as far to say that this blog is indeed my worst yet… you should have seen the other six!