Soul-searching, the blogging edition

A few prompts were floating about in the gaming blogosphere earlier this month that I wanted to reply to, but I never got around to it. One was Tyrannodorkus' post How you can use gaming to explore your love for writing and Rakuno's response Why I write. The other was the revelation of some well-known bloggers that they were playing with the thought of giving up on blogging altogether (check Liore, Belghast, Waiting For Rez). That gave me a good scare. They seem to reflect totally opposing sentiments, but somehow in my mind they make a connection by expressing the two conflicting feelings I have about blogging - sometimes even at the same time, to make things even more confusing.

Why do I blog?

Yes, why do I blog? Blogging is some kind of addition to me, and I'm unable to tell whether it's a good or a bad one. Sometimes I know what I want to write and inspiration flows. I get excited when I press the Publish button and I can't wait to see how people will react. At other times, like now, I feel obliged to write something because it's a certain day (why did I decide to try out a strict posting schedule again? To hell with science!), but I can't pick a subject or proper form. Today I'm just writing the words down as they come, so this post will probably be very unstructured. Let's treat it as an experiment.

Part of the answer is probably that I have some form of drive to write. Like Rakuno I loved reading as a child. I wanted to be able to write compelling stories myself, too. So, at the age of nine, I decided to (like Shintar) write a diary as a writing exercise. I was hardcore and kept a daily writing schedule (even though I didn't call it that back then). I wrote down everything I did and kept this up for years. I still have those diaries; if I want to know what was going on in the head of ten year old me, I can just pick one up. I don't want to, though, the amount of cringe is too strong for me. Somewhere in my late teens I lost interest in keeping a diary because I sensed my entries became either too factual or cringe worthy.

How I ended up blogging about games was pretty arbitrary and I won't bore you with that today (I've written about it before), but what fuels my blog is only partly a desire to write. I need to write a lot for my studies at university and my blog sometimes suffers because of it (or the other way around, which would be the bad side of the addiction). When I write a lot professionally, my desire to blog melts away.

Another part that motivates me to blog is the need for a creative outlet, and then I don't just mean writing. I get a lot of pleasure out of making my posts look good, do something with the billions of screenies I take in a manner that I enjoy looking back at a later time. I'm a perfectionist, so I can't just write a good article without picture, nor can I publish pictures without a story (that's too shallow, I want my blog to be about something).

I've learned a lot because of blogging: I've learned to write even when I don't have inspiration; I've learned to invent pictures for posts that don't naturally come with one (*cough* this post *cough*). I've learned some measure of HTML coding, my English has increased significantly, my fear to publish what I write has been greatly reduced and I've become much better with Photoshop and design in general (the ARPil badge is the first thing I made that I'm actually somewhat proud of). The problem is that I feel I've reached some sort of cap and so I find myself wondering if it isn't time to try something new. That's the other thing about me: I'm obsessed with learning new skills, as a hobby. And gaming is just one of the many things I like to do.

One thing I've picked up again is drawing. When my dad died earlier this year, drawing was something that helped me cope with it, in an almost meditative way. I try to draw more regularly to improve myself. What I would find really, really cool is if some day I would be good enough to do commission work of game characters. I'm good at animals and plants, though, not people. I'm focusing on hard and frustrating drawings that will teach me new things rather than easy fun and relaxing ones. Thing is, I'd love to share this road with people. Blogging about it could be extremely motivating (after all, I'd have to make something in order to post about it), but I know nobody will be interested. It is also very scary to post drawings, because they are personal to me and I'd feel miserable if people say they suck.

Nobody lives in a vacuum. I started this blog after I saw Lothirieth's blog (which now lies dormant) and have unconsciously adopted the customs of the gaming blogs around me: my game character pseudonym and avatar portrait are two clear examples of this. However, I don't like to be in a box and have been enjoying the more personal touch of geeky lifestyle blogs as well. I do feel like a gamer at heart, though. It boils down to me wanting to write about everything and be everybody at once, but obviously there isn't enough time in a lifetime to do so.

There is no clear conclusion to this post, alas. What I want to write about and how I want to go about it are topics that occupy my mind with every post I write, and I'm probably not alone is this. I hope to end this struggle by some day finding my perfect blogging formula, but until then, this little imperfect corner of the net that's mine will have to do.