According to site statistics, you spend an average of 3 minutes and 22 seconds to read my posts. Usually, these posts are between 400 and 700 words. I stick to this length because this is about all the attention I can muster to think about a thing. I also hate to read. Note, not ‘hate to learn,’ but hate to read. I’m way too nervous to sit still for very long. My posts usually take about 20 minutes to write, edit and publish. I write a few times a week as a way to stay fresh and as a way to release creative energy. I named this blog ‘Obsessed with Conformity’ as irony. There’s no niche. No theme. Just whatever pops into my head that I want to spend 20 minutes with. Because here’s the deal – I’m no expert on anything. I’m just a guy who likes to break things apart to see what’s there. It’s not brain surgery. I am writing a book – but that is hard. Not hard in terms of telling a story, but hard in terms of carving out the time necessary to tell it. It’s fairly emotional, and requires that I immerse myself in certain dark things. And you just don’t do that in 20-minute bursts at 2:34 pm before you run out to get your kids, or run into a meeting about seo. And so I beat myself up because I can’t just ‘jump in’ there and write the really important stuff whenever I have twenty minutes to spare. I have this idea that I need to escape somewhere to be completely alone for a while in order to write the book. And that’s not happening, either since I’m just a rat stuck in the machine. But – I am still a writer, and so this blog is where I put my thinking. In short blog posts that range from fiction to personal stories to serious business. Note – this is not the best way to establish an audience as a writer. Usually one must focus on a niche topic and then stick to it. Still, I feel like I’m developing an audience for my ‘style’ of writing that perhaps one day I can parlay into reading a book I write.
3:22. Maybe I write this length because I’m a trained copywriter and happen to think in small periods of time? It’s like this, when I would write a billboard back in the day, I’d get 2.2 seconds to say something to you that you remember. But now you stay on my blog for a few minutes at a time. And you like it. And I think how lucky I am to have your attention that long. I mean, brands fight for your attention all day. Do you know how much they’d pay to have your exclusive attention for three and a half minutes? That’s like, wow. Anyway, I assume that you’ve got better things to do than read a long ass blog post, so these short ones seem to work for both of us. Besides, unlike a book, posts this length offer me something like immediate closure.
Thank you for visiting and taking the time to read my words. Really. Thanks. You give me hope.
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Gabrielle Laine-Peters
Feb 10, 2012
I like your 20 min bursts – They make me think & laugh . . . what more can you ask?
Nichole
Feb 10, 2012
Ditto Gabrielle.
E
Feb 14, 2012
I think you sell the short bursts of concentrated energy short. I get my kitchen cleaned in 15 minute increments using a timer. I’m gonna challenge you. Get a kitchen timer, set it for 20 minutes, then do nothing else but write for that 20 minutes. When the timer goes off, stop and do something else for 20 minutes. Repeat two or three times a day and let me know your results. The problem is not the amount of time, geez, we ALL get 24 hours every day, but boredom and focus. Hey, I learned some of my best stuff from Flylady.com!