This post is thus titled, not because you, dear reader, will see anything here change, but because I am making a change in my own mental gears. (Think of these as internal gears, hidden away in some kind of casing, not the kinds of gears that are out in the open.) You see, my earlier thinking went something like this:

The more successful blogs are the ones that post more often. (I read that somewhere on the Internet, so it must be true. XD And, okay, even if the source is dubious, the assertion is plausible.) Blogging (and podcasting and anything else that’s essentially a construction of serial releases) is a numbers game: the more posts, the more likely more people will hit upon one that they’ll read (maybe even like! XD). (Did you notice how I didn’t say, “go viral”? Yeah, that’s because the idea of one of my posts going viral sounds surreal, even to me. ‘^^) So, obviously, to increase my odds of having a successful blog, I would need to post as often as possible. The highest posting frequency that is even conceivable to me is a post a day.

But of course it seemed bananas to come out of the gate with a daily blog when I hadn’t yet managed to do any kind of blog. So I figured I would start with a weekly blog, which seemed manageable for a newbie blogger like me (so long as I kept my inner perfectionist bound, gagged, and stuffed in the closet — check!). Then, every month, I would add another day’s post to the weekly roster until my blog went from a weekly blog to a daily blog. Totes doable, right?

Well . . . it is now the end of my month-long experiment of doing biweekly (i.e., twice weekly) posts, and it has become crystal clear to me that I’m already at my limit. (Good thing I ran it as an experiment, huh? ‘^^) You see, I have come to realise in the process of upping my manageable once-a-week cadence a mere measly 100% (XD) that, were I to increase my posting frequency further, I would not be able to sustain my writing efforts on my other two fronts (er, tracks rails). I’m just not that fast a writer. (Not yet, anyway — something else I’m practising!)

Also, the two posts per week I am writing now? I am acutely aware they’re far from deathless prose. (They’re practically the opposite: they’re deathful prose. =P) So there’s no reason to subject you, dear reader, to even worse prose — which is definitely what would happen if I tried to force myself to post even more frequently —, not to mention more of it. XD

So, in other words, I was gearing up (haha XD) to go into an even higher gear with this blog, when I noticed that my current gears were already grinding at their max capacity. The thing I need to do now is to grease said current gears so they stop grinding, so they spin with as little friction as possible.

I mention all of this not to navel-gaze in public (well, okay, not only to navel-gaze in public XD), but to share how I’m learning — in the hopes that others may feel heartened seeing someone else stumble about. I had what I thought was a good idea, and I started working my way towards it . . . and then I found, whoops, not so much. ‘^^

And that’s okay.

It’s okay to change gears† when the terrain changes. (These are totes vehicular gears now. XD) It’s in fact what one should probably do in such cases. That’s how one gets up a hill or around a bend or whatever without crashing and burning and all that.

And, I dunno about you, but not crashing and burning sure sounds like a good idea to me. ‘^^

†Yes, yes, I admit I am overloading this metaphor to the point of illogic: I am somehow changing gears . . . by not changing gears . . . ? You see, I’m changing mental gears because I’m not changing any physical — by which I really mean figurative (XD) — gears. . . . Never mind. (Hey! It made sense in my head. XP)