I Might Be Back, Maybe
Some days I really miss writing for this blog. I spent a year trying to get a Twitch stream up and running with no success. I’m not sure why I have a compulsion to scream into the void but it seems I do. Although I’m trying to just spread my passion and knowledge to the world it seems like I’m just talking to myself.
I probably should find a larger blog to contribute to instead. I should be a team player for someone else. I have this intense desire to do things my own way and be the leader of my team, even if my team is just me and even if I’m playing in the most minor of minor leagues.
I’m not 100% convinced I want to give up streaming. It seems like it’s a wonderful medium and has the advantage that it has the highest ratio of time spent to content creation. All things require some social media promotion so let’s ignore the time spent there. With Twitch I can sit there and paint and that is the content. With a blog I also need to stop to take and process pictures, then write the actual article. I hope it shows that I spend real effort attempting to write well, which takes time. Time that I am either spending with my family, or spending painting.
It is hard to argue with zero Twitch channel growth. Sure, in a year I had managed to amass over 200 followers. The problem was it was a rare occurrence that even one would show up to watch the stream. I streamed for only an hour a night – that’s how long I paint – and I don’t think I had the following that would make someone plan to watch my stream. An hour was just too short to catch people’s attention.
There were other issues as well: my promotion skills are poor. I do some promotion but it is all tainted by an mistaken belief that if I paint well and am entertaining that people will find me. In all my years of twitter I had jealously read #followfriday posts looking for my name and never once made a post promoting the people I followed. I awarded likes greedily as if they were precious jewels I didn’t want to devalue.
Enough negativity. For whatever reason my painting, twitch, twitter, instagram and blog are not as popular as my ego tells me they should be. I am not an influencer. I need to decide to decide if I can be a content provider with no following, or maybe just a consumer of content. Maybe the world doesn’t need to see what I am painting.
O ye dead Poets, who are living still
Immortal in your verse, though life be fled,
And ye, O living Poets, who are dead
Though ye are living, if neglect can kill,
Tell me if in the darkest hours of ill,
With drops of anguish falling fast and red
From the sharp crown of thorns upon your head,
Ye were not glad you errand to fulfil?
Yes; for the gift and ministry of Song
Have something in them so divinely sweet,
It can assauge the bitterness of wrong;
Not in the clamor of the crowded street,
Not in the shouts and plaudit of the throng,
But in ourselves, are triump and defeat.
The Poets by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Hey, nice to see you back at the blog!
I guess you need to have a good think about why you tweet, blog, stream or whatever. Do you want to be recognized as a hobby genius and hired on as a pro? Do you want to make some friends? Do you want to have a log of your work? Engage with newbs?
Lots of reasons to be online, but only you know what yours are.
For me, blogging is about chronicling my own work, making some connections, and occasionally winning free stuff 😉
Thanks. I’m still not 100% sure I’m back but I do have a couple of draft articles started. Apparently spammers have been watching this blog like a hawk, since I updated I’ve received 8 spam comments.
do not paint for anyone but yourself. share freely but dont pander to the meta. it will fee like work. you are clearly creative though so create and share. not creating and sharing is like emotional suicide for creatives. so create and shre what you want when you want cause you will also burn out if you try to crank out content to keep up with the daily algorithms. The mona lisa took 4 years! We panic if we don’t post something awsome in a day or two. dumb. you do you and people will follow, or not.
What Zab said, blog for fun otherwise you’ll burn out.
I started my blog to share with friends, and anyone else who might wander by. I had a handful of friends who long considered me an interesting, often amusing writer from my other outlets, from Facebook to going all the way back to Prodigy, back before AOL became prominent. Unfortunately if I opened feedback posts to anyone, I was flooded, and I do mean flooded, with highly questionable posts of Russian origin. So people,
including friends, had to be registered par moi, before they could post. I could have left the Russian posts to fester, and eat up space, in the background, but many were so embarrassingly vulgar, I was wary that someone might accidentally stumble on a way to
see them. Oh my, such areal bother wading through them to manually delete them. Eventually my health worsened and I no longer had the physical, mental and emotional strength to post on what became my terribly long ignored blog. I still desire to post but get frustrated when I’m not up to it. And Lord knows I have enough frustration in my life. *small smile* But enough about me. If you’d like to know more about me, check out my blog Surfacing on provick.ca. Cheers.
I miss your posts. I wonder if you should just try and write something shorter. Just a couple of paragraphs is more than nothing. I’m sure that it feels like it takes much more effort than it used to but part of that is building up endurance. Just like you if you go for a walk you will find it less taxing the more frequently you do it, the more you write the less taxing it becomes.
As for the spam, they shouldn’t be approved and it’s just one click to mark them as spam.
I wouldn’t worry about it. I used to be more popular, you just get random people complaining that you painted your models wrong and you are not using the optimized tactics that self appointed Internet experts insist anyone who knows anything would use. I restarted blogging about painting because I restarted painting. I do agree that you could Twitch while painting and not have to type anything up, but Google indexes typed text and even still images way better than video. I’m not sure sure how one finds Twitch streams, I have none, I follow none, I keep resisting people who tell me I should podcast or stream. Maybe a group blog is better, or a clan as gamers seem to like to call themselves online, but you have total control if you do it yourself. If you want to be popular, as popular as one can be in miniature painting circles you pretty much must paint well and focus on popular models (Space Marines). You also must paint big audacious projects. You must enter and win the Golden Deamon or at least some other major contest. You must do it full time, you must attend events regularly, you probably have to end up working for a gaming company or some really well-off collectors. I just want to paint a few models as a hobby.
Good luck.
I agree that these things do help you get noticed. I don’t know to the same degree.
As for people telling me how to paint: when you have no interaction any interaction is welcome. This post, and the last one, has gotten so many comments that if I received even half when I used to blog I’d probably still be doing it.