I Reread ALL Of My Old Blog Posts. Here Are My Biggest Takeaways...

We all have that one task we keep putting off. You know it'll be better to just get it over and done with, especially in the long run, but you just can't find the time or muster up the initiative to just do the dang thing.

A while back, I decided I wanted to go through every single one of my old blog posts and polish them up for a couple of reasons.

Formatting, for one. When I first launched my blog, I was using a different platform and some of the formatting didn't carry over from when I shifted to the current one.

There are also a few topics I'd like to revisit in the future, things I feel differently about now that I'm a little more experienced as a writer and like to think I've matured somewhat as a human (as an example, Said is Dead); the older posts will likely include a disclaimer encouraging readers to check out its more recent counterpart. Part of writing is unlearning and evolving, and I'm curious to see the shifts in my perspective.

I know I've gotten better at self-editing, too, and having a reliable in-browser editor has helped. Going through these posts, there were plenty of things to be fixed—a lot of which shouldn't have been issues in the first place; I'm chalking some of that up to the shoddy WiFi at the hardware store I was working at for a chunk of that time because I distinctly remember working on a few particular posts in the break room, but it's also a matter of negligence on my end for not double-checking those posts before uploading.

I wanted to go through and polish these posts up, fixing grammar and spelling and such, but I decided against doing major edits because I like having this archive of my writing. I didn't want to meddle too much with the past.

And there's another project I'm hoping to share more details about soon, but I didn't want to dive into it fully until I was sure my blog was in better shape.

The catch? Putting off for so long meant I had about 360 blog posts to comb through. It took about a month and a half. But it's done, and it was certainly a learning experience. In this post, I'd like to share some of my takeaways.

Just Do The Dang Thing!

Going into this blog overhaul, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed by the prospect. That was, of course, part of the problem.

These revisions were something I'd been wanting to tackle for a couple of months before I finally did. The longer I put it off, the more there was to fix.

Had I started this whole thing sooner, it probably wouldn't have been as laborious to get through—because, let me tell you, it was a slog to get through at times!

Long story short, if you have a big, overwhelming task to check off your list, just do the dang thing. Taking care of it now might still give you a headache, but it'll keep that headache from turning into a migraine.

Your Voice As A Writer Is Important

I haven't done that much editing on any of my WIPs as of late (unless you count a speed-read of Bound to the Heart's most recent draft ahead of caving into my coworkers' begging to read it), so going through my blog posts was the most of my own writing I've read for longer stretches in a while.

The first 12-18 months or so of posts were the hardest to read. Not only because they had the most formatting issues and typos, but also because they were prime examples of my writing straight out of college. Like I've mentioned in the past, I feel like so much of my time in college was focused on writing on an academic level. MLA formatting, the whole nine yards. Even in creative writing classes, there was still this sense of having to align with the expectations and stylistic choices of the instructor. And so, my understanding of "good writing" was that academic sense. That lack of self and stodginess.

It wasn't until years later that I started to find my own voice as a writer, and ultimately where I found my stride. When writing is more personable, it's often more enjoyable to read.

If you were to go through the archive, as I started calling it, I'd expect you'd be able to pinpoint the moment I started to shift from that academic tone and embraced my own vibes as a writer.

Social Media Hang-Ups

You'll often see me describe myself as an "internet introvert." Someone who lurks on social media and posts my own content but doesn't necessarily engage with others' out of a fear I'd be crashing a party in the comment section.

Much to my surprise, however, for the first year or so, I was noticeably focused on building my social media following (especially on Twitter, which I don't even use anymore).

One of the commonly cited reasons to start a blog when I was doing my initial research was the ability to build your online following because, in theory, a larger audience means more book sales when you're published. I think that influenced how I focused on in my blog posts.

In one, I was so excited to have hit fifty followers on Twitter. It's cool, sure, but the way I was writing about it was more like I'd checked something off a to-do list. Modern-day-me was actually a little annoyed with past-me. Social media wasn't about engagement or finding community like it is for me now, but an objective. And soon after that, I got burned out and took a hiatus from writing altogether.

Do I still think about those things? Sure.

There was a short period after my blog was approved for Google AdSense where I was more fixated on what would get views than what I wanted to be writing. I was only generating a few cents of revenue a day, and it was always the posts I didn't expect to take off that got the most clicks (my post on the fate of Christa from The Walking Dead is a perfect example). I've pulled myself back from that mentality, but it still creeps up from time to time.

It's one thing I'm more cognizant of as I'm taking on this new, soon-to-be-announced extension of this blog. There will be a whole new batch of analytics to mull over. I don't want my writing to get lost in tracking statistics and trying to game a system that is constantly changing. As is the case with blogging, a lot of the tutorials you'll find are about how to make it a profitable venture and it becomes all too easy to lose yourself in the research.

Suffice it to say, seeing my past self so focused on building a social media presence was weird. While that wasn't my initial intention when I started this blog, there was clearly a chapter where it was the focus.

Spellchecks And Balances, AKA AI Ain't Shit

To speed this all up, I activated the free trial of Grammarly to help identify errors in grammar and spelling. It was serviceable enough for catching these blunders, but its recommendations weren't always helpful.

One of the primary issues was its need to reformat anything that could be deemed, for lack of a better word, "voicey." In terms of stylistic choices, it didn't start highlighting any perceived mistakes until around the time I started coming into my own as a writer. When I started deviating from the "good writing" rubrics that had been ingrained in me since my youth.

Especially amid ongoing conversations on AI and how, if at all, it is permissible as a tool for writers, it's important to recognize that AI doesn't always know what it's doing. It's not a writer. It doesn't understand those nuances that make a story human. All it's doing is taking (stolen) data and doing its best to statistically guess what word should come next. It's like tapping the predictive text on your phone and hoping it generates something more cohesive than, "How do have an idea of going to be up to the point it's not as bad for the season."

Like, what? What even is that?

TLDR: Spellcheck isn't always as reliable as we'd like to believe it is.

(By the way, you won't see me using generative AI to write my books. It's all flesh and blood here.)

I knew this overhaul of my old blog posts was going to be quite the undertaking, but I didn't realize how eye-opening it would end up being.

It's been interesting to explore this timeline of my growth as a writer and revisit my past self, even if I was occasionally cringing at her. I'm also excited to see where things go from here. As we head into the new year, I've got a handful of topics I'm planning to revisit, and if there's a particular one you'd be interested in seeing, let me know in the comments.