The lure of the blank slate

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I am sitting at my small desk, looking out the window at a cloudless blue sky. The heat wave has faded a little around the edges, leaving a breezy 22° summer day behind. And I am musing on this blog, on writing, on money, on new beginnings.

Blogs have evolved over the past decade or so that I’ve been online. What began as a literal diary, handwritten in HTML files, has become a cottage industry. People write posts for Google, for Pinterest, for the roaming, dissatisfied masses of the internet to stumble across. It’s an art, and the best get paid for it. Adverts, affiliate links, books, courses. The real money, they say, is in your list.

(My list is the Weekly Challenge, which is on a short hiatus while I figured things out).

Cinnamon Sunrise is not niche enough or lifestyle enough to turn into a real success. I considered what I might do to narrow it. Write only about food: cheap, healthy, tasty recipes which underpin my life and flood my instagram. Or write only about money, a highly profitable niche with many desperate people willing to spend money they don’t have.

Or write about being happy, which is impossible to monetise. Because being happy is rooted in looking around yourself and saying I have enough.

Right now, I have enough. I don’t need more money.

Right now, I want to write about being happy, about food, about money, and about my day-to-day life. It’s a terrible blog strategy. It won’t fly well on Pinterest. And the only thing I can sell you is the notion that it’s better not to get caught up in niche product driven businesses.

But. It’s what I want to do. Because I’m old fashioned, and I remember blog hops and the weird window a blog opened onto the life of someone else. I followed Fitnessista through deployments, two pregnancies, surgery, a thousand daily posts over the years. I’ll never know her, and it’s a bit weird, and yet I’m committed now – I’ll be reading for a long time yet.

So this is my old-fashioned blog about anything and everything. But mostly about trying to be happy. Trying to be content. Trying to be a better person without it driving me crazy.

Maybe you’ll stick around. Probably you won’t. But I think I’ll enjoy it a whole lot more than writing a thousand posts about Keto Vegan Recipes for Summer Picnics or whatever other keyword stuffed opportunistic niche I could come up with.