A shift in objective

It is funny how sometimes I feel I have nothing to say and then other times I feel like I could sit down and bang out 5000-word essays non-stop. I've been coming up dry when it comes to blogging. I still like the idea, but there have been so many occasions when I don't feel like anything I say is worth putting out there into the ether to be read by my extremely limited internet audience. And the less I post, the more that audience shrinks.

Yet, I want to be writing. I am willing to take on the most uninteresting of journalistic assignments in order to be writing and to have my name out there in the world--and in print. The trouble is that I remain conscious of a future audience. I worry that the words I write will somehow negatively influence some one's decision about me. It could be a future or current employer. I'd love to write about the Russian-Georgian conflict of last week, but it is likely to be a sensitive issue for people in my organization and I'd be better served by staying silent on the issue. And there's always the idea that sometime in the future my children might get a hold of my writing. If course I'd really be in trouble if they ever began reading through my journals.

For some time I've had the notion of changing the purpose of the blog. There are plenty of people writing about books and writing, and while I'm not likely to stop doing that, there's no reason to compete with people who could do a better job. It is better to capitalize on my unique position, using my life, my personality and personal predicaments instead. And at the same time it would better show case my writing abilities, which really should be the purpose behind the blog.

The work-life-writing balance, an issue that has plagued me for some time, and inspired many too many journal entries, is about to get worse as it, again, becomes the work-life-writing-school balance. I imagine that there are few MFAs out there pursuing MBAs. By shifting the blog's objective somewhat I might actually end up writing more and writing better and more interesting posts.