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The Next Thing

   

Were anything of mine capable of being legendary, it would be how I turn out blog posts on a daily basis with virtually zero prior planning.

I’ve mentioned before that I have a queue of topics for when I can’t think of anything in the moment. It’s a good fallback–so good, in fact, I don’t have to use it that much. Instead, I add topics to it fairly regularly, and just as quickly cycle them out with posts. There are a number of post ideas that have hung around in my topic todo list for months. It’s less that I don’t want to write about them and more that I know they are particularly difficult to write well about. Most of them are social justice-oriented topics, which are always fraught in terms of approaching them with both sensitivity and appropriate information.

Whenever a post goes up on a seemingly random topic you’ve not seen me write about before, chances are it came out of the topic queue. Currently, there are 58 topics in it. I think at its peak, there were about 80 items in there at one point. So, I do use it, but it clearly doesn’t guide what I post every day.

At this point, though, I’m finding fewer interesting current events to write about, and am beginning to turn more to the queue. Part of it is just the part of the political season we’re in. It’s post-convention, but before any debates, before the general election campaign has really gone into full swing. I certainly have no interest in writing about Donald Trump yelling at a woman for having a crying baby–do we really need more evidence of what an awful person, much less Presidential candidate, he is?

But I’ve also written about Hillary Clinton at length. Anyone who reads this blog knows full well how I feel about her (and that I’m voting for her in November). Probably not a lot to say in that regard, either.

And since I consider political topics relatively easy to write about, posting on other topics is more difficult by comparison. It’s good to be challenged, though. One thing I may write more of are reviews. I see movies, I read books, I watch TV shows, I play video games. But then, pop culture criticism is already a terrible wasteland of pseudo-intellectualism. Do I really need to contribute to that? I have, of course, written reviews here before, but I don’t make them a common occurrence–they might show up once or twice a month. Dare I increase the frequency?

True to form, I have no idea what I’ll be writing about this week. It will be just as much a surprise to you as it will to me. On the plus side, nobody really reads these meta posts, so I can say just about anything I want and no one will notice. I am kind of itching to do a weeklong series again, though. I’ve enjoyed that when I’ve done it in the past. Of course, it is a lot more work: I have to do more research to plumb the depths of a topic and produce a feature-length article spread across five days. Even so, it makes for an interesting challenge. It’s just a question of what topic I’m engaged with enough to commit that kind of time, energy, and attention to.

But listen to me ramble. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow. Have a good week!