Blogging and me

I generally don’t indulge in a lot of introspective navel gazing in my posts, but I recently had the urge to write something about my blogging routine. 

I’ve been blogging for over five years and I thoroughly enjoy it. This blog, excatholic4christ, is a ministry of Gospel outreach to Roman Catholics and also a ministry of warning to evangelicals about the dangers of ecumenism with the RC church. I also like to sprinkle in some non-theological topics here and there. So, this blog is a ministry and also a creative outlet. I like to write and I also enjoy reading the posts of other WordPress bloggers. I’m very grateful for the friendships of several fellow-bloggers. After I was laid off from Kodak Alaris last September, blogging became my unofficial, part-time job.

A lot of time goes into researching, writing, and publishing posts six days a week, Monday thru Saturday, with an occasional post on Sundays. I’ve developed a system over the years of drafting posts two-weeks ahead of publication and I even created a two-week blog worksheet which helps to keep me on track (photo above). The advantages of a two-week draft queue are 1) I’m able to “level out” creative peaks and valleys, and 2) I’m able to “fine tune” drafts before publication. As a draft post sits in the queue for a couple of weeks, I’ll usually add some points that didn’t occur to me when I initially wrote it or I’ll delete unnecessary or imprudent material. I’ve written several posts “in the heat of the moment” that I later heavily edited or deleted after I cooled off.

All of this brings me to the point that I really wanted to discuss. I spend a lot of time blogging, but I wasn’t sure exactly how much time. A few weeks ago, I thought it would be interesting to record all of the time I spent on my blogging activities (writing, editing, reading, commenting, responding to comments, etc.) in a sample week. So I used my iPhone stopwatch and set out to do exactly that. Nerdy? Sure, and I was doing a pretty good job of it for several days, but eventually fizzled out. A thought/conviction kept gnawing at me that it was wrong to put a stopwatch to ministry, so I quit that dumb project.

Blogging here at WordPress is a great blessing, however, I have to constantly align it with my other responsibilities that maybe aren’t so enjoyable. How do you fit blogging into your life? I’m sure most bloggers operate a lot more extemporaneously compared to my Poindexter-self with my two-week worksheet. No, the worksheet is NOT attached to a clipboard! I’m not quite that bad!

p.s. I definitely don’t like the new WordPress block editor. WordPress should have left well enough alone.