April 4th, 2020 marked ten years since I first started blogging. If we’ve known each other for that long you might faintly recall that time I started my blog: it was just after I’d finished teaching in South Korea for a year and was travelling through southeast Asia. Here is my very first post:
What literary brilliance! Short and to the point!
I should be clear that I’d actually started writing the blog before April 4th but was hesitant to publish it. As I stayed in Thailand for a month, I still wrote but kept them to myself. It was finally when I set up an account on WordPress.com that I started publishing on a regular basis. So that screenshot above is not the original one, but the one below is how the post appeared so many years ago on stevensirski.wordpress.com:
Notice the lack of back-linking, not just because it was my first post, but because I didn’t know how to do that just yet. Nor did I understand how back-linking helped to raise your site’s prominence in search engine rankings (such as Google’s), but that has since gone down in importance. But with that first template I practiced my writing and editing so as to make an easier reading experience.
One of the methods I used on that site was making sure a sentence ended in the middle of a paragraph. That way people’s eyes could easily move to the next.
It wasn’t until later recently (2019 or so) that blogging and online writing became more “chopped up” by sentence-paragraphs.
You know the type, the paragraphs that only contain one sentence and give the webpage lots of white space so it feel uncluttered.
The current website didn’t always look like this either. About two years after starting on the wordpress.com site, I moved to my own domain, creatively called “stevensirski.com”. And for that move I celebrated by having the site redone so I could integrate more photos into my website and not have to rely on external hosts, such as Flickr. The new site looked something like this:
But that version didn’t last too long because I found it too complicated to maintain. Although I was grateful towards my friend who had made it based on the WordPress editing environment, the plugins needed to upload photos were difficult to use and would often reset all of my naming schemes after uploading. So, I reverted to another WordPress template which I used for a couple of years, though I can’t find a screenshot of the site exactly as it was. Do you remember what the 2012 WordPress template looked like? Like this:
And it stayed like that for a while because it was easy to use and clear. It was also around this time I had finally learned how to create more categories, static and dynamic pages, throughout my stay in Canada, my travels throughout Australia and southeast Asia (again) and Canada again.
Sadly, it was during my working travels through Australia that I wouldn’t be able to find the time to post anything at all for about six months. It was quite disappointing but I know that a few things held me back: lack of time after work, technology impediments (internet speeds in rural Australia at the time were horribly slow) and, even worse, a disappointment in how things were turning out in Australia at that time. On the up side, however, my first stint through Australia gave me quite a few photos I could use, notably the “tractor at sunrise” which I used as a header image for quite a while. I wouldn’t resume posting until the middle of 2012 when I decided to go southeast Asia (again) to record a jazz. But that’s a post for another time.
And so I’d write and publish the odd article and I did make an effort to monetize the website, but that never worked out. I had no clue as to how to run ads, consistently generate content, publish, find photos, edit them, upload photos and videos to various social media platforms, and, probably most importantly: I didn’t publish happy dappy “I love to travel this is the greatest thing ever” blog posts. I also didn’t have a bikini body (and still don’t), the combination of which seems to have helped a few bloggers grow their audience.
Further, the whole blog-as-business idea bothered me. I did make a bit more of an effort in early 2013 (travelling through SE Asia again and in between jobs…again) to make another go of it but I hated it. Instead of living that glamorous and fun lifestyle of travelling and posting pics, I was stuck at my computer trying to generate ideas to write about. I was living in hostels in Kuala Lumpur and Georgetown, Malaysia at the time and, although it was a rather relaxed lifestyle, I wasn’t able to generate any profits, which meant the website and the time spent developing it was more of a ticking time clock until I had to face reality, or at least earn a paycheque.
It was at this time that I tried my hand at publishing my first ebook about teaching ESL around the world. I put it up online and then, really, had no idea how to market the thing! I mean, I understood the concept of marketing and such, but I didn’t like the idea of constantly trying to promote my own stuff. I’ve always be of the mindset that if I was “that good”, then the money would come. It never did. And I’m not sure if anyone ever downloaded the ebook. I do know that some people read the articles because I would get emails about teaching overseas.
Either way, it was a good test and I did gain a better understanding of what it took to sit down and actually write an ebook (only 34 pages!) and how “easy” it was to “easily” convert one’s blog posts into an ebook. (It’s not. It requires massive amounts of reformatting which can drive you crazy.) And I wasn’t sure I wanted my name associated with the whole “you can teach ESL all over the world and be happy with your life choices” movement.
But what would I want my name associated with?
And that’s probably the main reason I went with the “stevensirski.com” URL rather than something splishy splashy like “A Winnipegger gone wild”, “Prairie Boy Does the World” or something more lucrative like “Travel blogger, big money bagger” Y’know, catchy titles like those.
(Okay, I did try out “Pegtown Scribe”, and I still kind of like it, but I don’t use it very often any more. You can see it displayed in the the above versions of the website.)
After my attempt at writing an ebook (and still not generating a profit cause, again, I didn’t really know what to do with it), I decided I’d try to simply write as much as I could. It was around this time that I read Stephen King’s autobiography in which he states that he wouldn’t leave his house until he had written 2000 words that day. 2000 x 365 days = lots of words and lots of potential books. Or so the thinking goes.
So I put my mind to writing as much as I could. From March 2013 until June, when I finally gave up trying to make a go of monetizing my website, I think I wrote some 150,000 words, my best day was 8,000 words, if my memory serves me correct. Here are some of the files from that writing blitz:
I did have a spreadsheet but it’s been lost in the shuffle. Luckily, my first post of 2014 describes what I had accomplished in 2013:
“In any event, I wrote on 138 days between March and December with an averaged of 15.33 days per month. The average daily output was about 2133 words. So it certainly can be done, writing 2000 words a day, so this year I’ll track it right from the get go. I may go back and calculate how many words I wrote from Jan-Mar just out of curiosity.”
And out of all those words I don’t think I published a fraction of them. I mean, they consisted of everything from dating, travelling, stocks, or even stream of conscious writing. Anything and everything I could think of I tried to write a blog post about it with a target of about 750 words each. Sometimes I’d start with something catchy such as “I want to write 8,000 words today but I don’t know how.”
You’ll also note in that screenshot of files above that there are only a few during the month of May. That’s because I had returned to Australia to work and was putting in 12-hour days or more on a regular basis which left me very little time to write. But I didn’t want to stop and I wanted to push myself to see just how far I could go. I was determined to hit an average of 2,000 words a day for the year. Though I never hit that goal, I did get within 500 words on average per day for that entire year.
So, although the content wasn’t very useful, I was able to work on the mechanics of writing. That is, going from idea to execution, to physically being able to type that many words in a day, and the ability to arrange my thoughts coherently. Further, I had tested my endurance to see if I could work a physically demanding job and still continue my output. (It’s rather difficult.) Another issue to deal with, one that everybody who is trying to create or apply something they’ve learned, is to shorten the time in between the “learning” stage to the “able to write about and publish” stage. This was critical in being able to go forward with the blog.
Nowadays it’s not so difficult to turn out 2,000-3,000 words in a day but I don’t try to publish as often. A good month is once a week, anything more is great, anything less and I know I’ve been taking care of other things in live.
The difficulty, as it pertains to blogging, is incorporating pictures, videos, audio files, text headers, and the like. Some times the internet speed isn’t so quick or the transfer speed between phone and computer is slow or, very simply, sometimes the cord isn’t convenient to plug in which then disrupts the creative flow. All of these can be little aggressors that prevent publication and can disrupt the writing flow, so care needs to be taken to learn how to work around those disruptions. And it’s not always as simple as “go for a walk” or “do something else for a while”. It’s about still being productive towards the end goal while still dealing with those interruptions.
Since then, the travel writings have continued and I’ve tried to post at least once a month. I’ve thrown in some other subjects in there and I’ll continue to do so. Although the main purpose of the blog or website remains the same, “the life and times of a working traveller”, but there are many elements to that. It’s a type of portfolio, though I can’t say I’m looking for any work at the moment. There are some topics I find completely boring (eg, how to use a phone in China) so I try avoid those posts unless I’m really looking for ideas. Then there are other types that may well mark the sign of the times. After all, we are in the midst of a Coronavirus outbreak.
And that has remained important: to mark the times, to voice an opinion or “for the record” record my thoughts. And I doubt that will change. The content will change over time but the idea will remain the same: the life and times of a working traveller.