This Blog in 2016

Writing about writing; this is what I’ve done on many occasions before, and it’s something that I suspect many other bloggers do too. I like to set goals for my writing and talk about what I’m planning for blogging, but like many other plans there is never a follow-through. This is why at first I was a little hesitant about writing yet another ‘status’ post on here, and perhaps just start the new year by ploughing through with the real things I’m excited about writing; posts about the tensions within the EU, about updates in Thai politics and all that. However, in the end I couldn’t resist the temptation. And so, in this post, I’m going to be talking about the direction I want to head with this blog this year. 

My Goals in Blogging

1) More posts 

A goal that I’ve liked to write every time I make one of these posts is to “post more”. That’s still something I’d like to accomplish, because in the past year I’ve only managed about one post a month, which is not bad but ideally I’d like to write more often than that. However, it’s important for me to recognise that I’m becoming increasingly busier, and I often find myself having some free time at the end of each day, but I would be too tired to actually do any research or real writing. Still, however, I’d like to try. Once every two weeks or so seems like a reasonable goal in my opinion.

2) More topics

I guess that in a way, 2015 was my year of international affairs. At the start of the year, the ‘Global Politics’ category only had one post from 2014 about Hong Kong, but I wrote seven more last year about everywhere from China to Russia to France to the US. By contrast, I only wrote three posts last year about Thai politics. In a way, not much has ‘happened’ in Thai politics this year, with the stagnant waters ever since the coup in late 2014. However, with the completion of the new draft constitution not too long in the future, the start of the ASEAN Economic Community, and a host of other subjects, I probably will return to writing about Thailand soon.  In addition, I might write more about topics not related to politics and current events. History is something that I’m itching to get back to writing about, but I’m still not yet sure what that would entail however.

3) More post formats and experimentation 

My writing has evolved significantly in the past two or three years. I was going back through some old posts today, and I really feel like my writing style has changed over the years. However, recently I’ve seem to stuck with the same style of article writing: long and formal, with a lot of subheadings. Writing, like any other craft, must go through constant experimentation and change. For this reason, I’ve begun to do other post formats recently, beginning with the ‘explainer’ type of post that I did for the American elections.  I’m particularly excited about doing more explainers this year, and I can imagine a lot of topics that I’d like to do an explainer about: everything from Thailand’s political history to the Greek debt crisis to even really obscure historical topics…I’m also looking at experimenting more with other formats as well.

What I’m unlikely to do, sadly, is going back to write fiction. I love writing fiction, and I’d love to go back to it (something I haven’t done since mid 2014!). But writing fiction takes a lot of time; plotting, developing characters and the actual writing took me untold number of hours every time. I wanted to write a novel at the start of last year, and that idea quickly flew off the radar once I realised how little time I actually have. And so, the number of short stories on my Short Stories page has been 11 for some time, and will probably remain so in the foreseeable future.

This is a year that’s important for me personally. Time goes fast, and by the end of this year my university applications will be done. In between, it’s going to be a crazy whirlwind of work. Doing the International Baccalaureate program is a lot of work, I’ve realised. It’s a busy time.

 And so, broadly, that’s the direction that I’m heading for in 2016. It’s an exciting world that we live in, and it feels great to be writing about it and posting it on this blog. I thank every reader for supporting my reading, and I hope to continue to receive your thoughts and criticism throughout this year.

Happy New Year!

-Ken