Creating a Content Plan

If you're reading this, there's a good likelihood that you know I was in a play recently down at Fauntleroy Church. We rehearsed it three or four days a week for about six weeks before putting it on last weekend, and now it's over. On Friday night, we had a little party down at a restaurant close to the church, and I chatted some with the folks who came to the play on opening night and supported us.

One of the people at this party was the woman who is the music director for my church. We got to talking a little bit and she asked what it is that I do for work. I answered that I was temping, but starting to look around for more full-time work.

"Well, what is it that you want to do?" she asked.

It's such a tough question to answer. I told her about my interest in being a college Sports Information Director, and the application I have outstanding to do marketing and social media work, and some of my other experience. She said she had some things that she was doing in the creative field that I'm interested in, so I gave her my card and talked about my selling points a little more with my energy being perhaps my strongest suit.

I do struggle sometimes with the Ira Glass quote I used a while ago. I feel like I don't create enough consistently to feel confident in all of my abilities. I would love to make it by economically by doing creative work, but I worry I need to cultivate my skills more to do it professionally. Right now I think I'm strong enough as a writer and designer that I can do professional projects with my skills, but not strong enough that I could do those projects exclusively. That is to say, I'm not specialized enough, I'm a bit of a jack of several trades.

I talked about this over breakfast with Emily the other day, my desire to make a living doing creative work whether its design or writing or acting or stand-up comedy, and she turned the discussion to webcomics. There are a lot of webcomics out there, and a lot of them are kinda-sorta meh, for lack of a better word. There are a handful that stand out of the crowd, your Questionable Content-s, your xkcd-s, your Sinfests, your Penny Arcades. They all update regularly. If you update haphazardly or irregularly, you're not going to get read.

Which brings me back to this blog. I want to make this blog something where I can make use of my creative skills (especially writing, of course), my analytical skills, and my web skills, to bring you something that is hopefully fun to read, interesting, thought provoking, or otherwise useful. In order to get better, I'm going to try to get on a posting schedule. I think once-a-day is a bit too much for me at the moment; I want to keep these posts at a certain length with sustained thoughts. I'm going to aim for twice-a-week for now, and go Monday and Friday, with perhaps another post in-between if I can come up with it. Hopefully, you can join me on this endeavor.