Blogging about blogging: This is how it works

I've explained why I do this blog several times, and the simplest explanation is that I spend a lot of my life writing straight news stories with no fat or bullshit on them, and this is where I get to unload of lot of absolute bollocks out of my head, and use as much swearing and unnecessary adjectives as humanly fucking possible. 

But I haven't really talked about how I do it, because it's evolved into a weird process that works for me, and I don't expect it to work for anybody else. And while writing about writing is a sin, Martin, this is how it works.

When the Tearoom of Despair started in 2009, I spent the first decade or so writing two or three blog posts a week, trying to break the 1000-word mark. This meant I got into the habit of rambling too much, and conflating too many things, and always trying to find a viewpoint worthy enough of all that time and effort. It was getting harder and harder, and then I went daily, and it's proven so much easier, because I can get to the goddamn point a lot faster.

To keep up that pace, I do follow a vague pattern, which makes it easy to come up with a week's worth of posts - Monday is usually something personal; Tuesday is more of a review of a great comic or movie I've seen recently; Wednesday and Saturdays are low-content days where I'm happy to post an image or video, stick a paragraph or two on it and call it a day; Thursday is when I have a good moan about something, because we all like to get this shit off our chests, Friday is movie or music night; and Sunday is some kind of comic art, usually as part of an ongoing series of posts.

None of these are set in stone - sometimes I just cannot deal with a bitch session, no matter how much it itches - but they provide a good guideline

I generally write a week in advance, it's only just turned July as I write these words. There is one first draft to smash everything out, a longer period of putting it in order and finding some kind of hook or theme, and then a short look over it to make sure all the formats and images don't look like shit.

I don't know if this is working for anybody else, and please don't try to tell me because I never read the few comments left here. Sorry if you've ever said something illuminating about something I've posted, but I haven't looked at those things in three years or so. Social media is the place for dialogues, this is Monologue City.

I don't even know what the audience is, the past couple of months have had some extraordinary visitor numbers for this blog - I cracked a new record monthly mark in June. But I don't believe any of it, and since it is never one big post getting all the numbers, but a bunch of them getting relatively smaller numbers, so I assume it's all some kind of AI scraping, which is reason #723 why AI sucks shit.

But I'm not doing this for the audience, or to make money from it, or raise my profile. I do it because it's fun, and that's the main reason I sit down and spew all this out. That's how I do it, it's as simple as that.