One of the things I’ve noticed in a lot of adult fiction, is that authors tend to have their characters swear way too fucking much. Now, I’m not opposed to swearing. I think that it adds flavor and personality to dialogue that would be missing otherwise.

The problem is that it’s overused. Like with exclamation points, using the word “fuck” over and over again dilutes the message you’re trying to portray. Now, there is an exception to this. If the character is a potty mouth, then it’s fine. But having all of your characters swearing like sailors all the time? It just makes the words mean nothing.

When you’re a blogger, one of the things you do is talk about blogging. A lot of people do this. Yeah, that was all from the last few weeks.

Not a day goes by that I don’t see at least one blogger talk about blogging. There’s nothing wrong with this. As referenced above, I do it too. I just find it funny that often times I will resort to talking about the act of blogging when I don’t have anything else to talk about. So, today, I write a blog post about people talking about blog posts on their blogs. It’s all very meta.

I was on a roll. I was blogging everyday. I was feeling good about it. There were cool things I wanted to add to the site. And then…

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

It made me think about the pressure I felt to keep blogging. I was having fun, but apparently there was a little bit of me that felt pressured into keeping the blog train going. Why else would I feel a little upset that there hasn’t been a blog post in a few days? And it’s not guilt. I don’t feel guilty that I’ve not written. I have some readers here, but it’s not like I have a million member army or a ton of paying subscribers. I write for myself.

I’m a writer by trade. I don’t think I’m HG Wells or Arthur Conan Doyle or anything, nor do I proclaim to have perfect grammar or spelling. But I can thread a few words together and have them sound at least somewhat coherent for those reading.

I’m also a reader. I read a ton, and I always have. I was reading “chapter books” when I was 5 years old. Mostly because I wanted big books since those were more impressive than the picture books my friends were reading. I was reading Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and Stephen King in 5th grade. Maybe not the best thing for a kid, but I liked them and spent a lot of time in the library.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I’ve become a bit obsessed with this blog. I haven’t had this much fun since I switched to Linux in 2017. From the writing to learning new things about Hugo, it has been a blast.

First I added comments, then I added comment counts. That was fun. These last couple of days I’ve been messing around with file structure (Hugo calls it taxonomy), and the RSS feed. I’m actually writing this post to test out my RSS feed changes as well as test some additions to the script I talked about the other day.