Light bulb moment. Put everything in one place.
I’m fairly new to this blogging game – I’ve been doing it for a few years, but only every now and then. It’s a lot of hard work, as writing should be, and takes up all your time, as it should for anyone serious about writing. But I have a job, and a family, house and dogs to wrangle, and parents to see (who I don’t think I see nearly enough, although I probably do). I’d love to make a living from blogging (I was a full-time scriptwriter for twenty-five years or so), but it’s kind of a Catch 22 – I can’t blog all the time because it doesn’t earn me enough, but it won’t earn me enough unless I do it all the time. And anyway, who has that much to say of interest every day? OK, I think I do, but I don’t have the time to write an essay about it each time, which is what I mostly tend to do in my blogs. But that’s when the light bulb went on.
I was walking the dogs at Ninesprings just now (it’s part of Yeovil Country Park, which I’ve blogged about before, although not yet Ninesprings – soon I hope, but there are a LOT of photos!), and it suddenly occurred to me that I blog all the time, putting my thoughts on Facebook, and (mostly) my bird photos on Twitter. The light bulb moment was that they should all start here, on my blog. And so they shall – watch this space.
Of course, then I needed a photo, so I went to Flickr, and searched for pictures of light bulbs within their royalty-free collection, after telling my son, who happened to be sitting at the table at the time, about Creative Commons licensing, photo royalties and so on. But then I thought, no, hang on, I have a Nikon, I can take my own photo. So I did. Of course, because mostly I take pictures of birds, I take photos in RAW, which needs importing into Photoshop, and then it needs putting into a format that WordPress likes, which is another thing entirely, trying to work out why I couldn’t see the featured image in the preview (I need a more expensive plan, I think, or a different theme, unless anyone knows better). Because you can’t see how it comes out until you actually post it to Facebook or Twitter, and then it’s too late, and you’re editing in public, which is never good. And a watermark, of course… But there I stopped, and thought, you know what, if someone wants to use my photo of a light bulb, they’re welcome to it.
So, not quite as quick as a Facebook or Twitter post, but not a four-hour essay either. I’ll get quicker, I hope!
Alastair Swinnerton 