Yesterday I finally posted a piece about Part 15 unlicensed ultra-low-power radio at Radio Survivor. It’s a topic dear to my heart, and one that I covered quite a bit here back in the day.
I’ve wanted to tackle it for Radio Survivor for months. I finally got kicked into writing because the New York Times covered LA’s KCHUNG Radio, which uses a 100 milliwatt AM broadcast as its primary platform, even though I’m sure most listeners tune in to the more widespread internet broadcast.
But this post isn’t about radio. It’s about trying to write. Something all writers love to write about. No?
I’ve always been a writer. I’ve been writing online consistently for the last fourteen years, and started writing professionally seven years ago. Yet it seems like I always have a stacked up queue of pieces that I want to write, but have difficulty getting through.
I don’t think it’s quite a case of procrastination. Frankly speaking, I’ve done a lot of work on myself in the last five years to deal with the root causes of that and made quite a bit of progress, if I do say so myself. Also, I don’t have nearly as much trouble cranking out pieces that I’ve promised to others. One of the things that really helped my Radio Survivor output was committing to a weekly feature and sharing responsibility for others. Inspiration or no, hell or high water, I get those published.
But the more personal writing to-do, it grows.
As with the KCHUNG piece, it helps if there’s some exogenous catalyst that forces the topic to the front of mind. I just wish there were more of these catalysts for the rest of the stack.
This post is even an example. I thought about it earlier in the day, but didn’t start writing because I had other work that needed to get done first. It’s only because I still had a few ounces of mental energy left when I was done that I’m actually putting words to the keyboard. Otherwise there’s a good chance it would be lost to the land of lost blogs.
At this moment I’m also propelled by a desire to regain a sense of immediacy with my writing, especially here. It’s great for a post to be well considered and crafted, but blogging was invented to connect with the moment and let writers hold forth with fewer impediments. So this is me trying to put it into practice.
Like I said, there’s a whole backlog of pieces trying to escape my brain. Not all of them have to do with radio or other topics I write about most frequently. I’m going to try and let them free here.
In so doing, I hope maybe to solve a little of that riddle, how I can write more of what I (ostensibly) want to, not just have to. Wish me luck.
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