I don’t blog as much as I used to. Long time readers will notice that I had a time where i would write almost daily, which at the time was pretty fun, and in the first 3-4 years, had a consistent readership of 10s of thousands of viewers per month. The black and white and yellow scheme – above, was hosted on Blogspot, and achieved good notoriety, with some top blog lists, articles, republications, and really surprisingly, many people telling me they read it!
This was a time, as well, when there weren’t a lot of blogs, so it was good to position this in a particular time and place. There are many more great sources of landscape architecture and urban dialogue, and my interests evolved where blogging was less important. That said, I consume a lot less info on landscape architecture, and probably use Twitter to fill some of what the blog did in terms of saving snippets and other things for retrieval later. While I appreciated the readership and dialogue, and continue to do so, the goal was always to write and reflect on what I’m personally interested in.
So over the more recent years, I do a post occasionally, which are often book reviews or reflections on some writings on something I feel is worth exploring. Less posts but more focused, not on the day to day, but more generally. I switched to a new site a few years ago- which is now on WordPress and hosted on its own URL. Ebbs and flows of blogging are OK, and as I mentioned, there’s a lot of ways of writing, learning, and growing. Last year, for instance, I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time, so wrote a novel (which as you may guess, has elements of landscape and urbanism), and want to write more of those (and much better ones).
But with these ebbs and flows, the itch sometimes comes back. Sometimes its the same itch to just write, other times its a different itch in a different place. While some bloggers strive for more polished work (and many, many are much better writers than I) my blogging is often sparsely edited and often just my ‘notes’ on things. The blog is a notebook and while there’s sometimes narrative elements, I don’t spend a lot of time mapping out what i want to write. In some ways I’ve done shorter posts, other times delved deeper which maybe has some more structure, but not a lot of planning. I’ve done that planning in writing for academic pursuits (which is a very different style of course), but there’s a middle ground of accessible, interesting, and rigorous writing that I want to focus on.
My goal now is to focus on writing more polished work in an accessible manner and publish in various other sources (books, magazines, other sites) – opinion, interesting things, history, culture, landscape and urbanism. I want to write a book. And maybe a novel or two as well. Growing as a writer, as one would expect, involves writing, which I haven’t done as much of lately, while not in school and not blogging. And like any skills, they are in constant need of exercise. So I’m inspired to write more, and exercise those skills, so the blog is a natural place for some of this to happen.
While I’ve been feeling this, I looked at my blog and noticed that first, I was coming close to my 10 year anniversary of when i started blogging (late 2007). And second, I had published, a bit over 900 posts in this time. Thus my reconnection with wanting to write more and this serendipitous goal is something to inspire me to achieve, I have set a target to get to: 10 years and 1000 posts
Which i think is a respectable 100 posts per year and a decade of blogging. So my goal in the next year or so is to write around 100 more posts. I’m also going to try to write things in other places. If you’re used to a post a month, this will be a few more than you’re used to, but trust me, you’re gonna like it. After that, who knows…
VEGITECTURE REVISITED
On a related note, through some miracle of internet archiving, I managed to find the long-lost spin-off Vegitecture blog. Lost story, but my account was hacked in 2010, which corrupted a number of websites such as my Terra Fluxus site as well as vegitecture.net, the latter of which i didn’t have backed up. So although i searched around for remnants I thought it was lost forever. Earlier this summaer, i stumbled upon the brilliant and somewhat frightening Wayback Machine, an internet archiving project that probably has a lot of information we never knew was actually being backed up. I was able to piece together the entire collection that was published through 2009-2010, which totaled an additional 140 posts which includes thousands of images and over 50,000 words on vegetated architecture. You can access these through the site, and I’m also in the process of compiling the best in some form of publication.
