I am in a bind.
I love writing, I NEED writing, but I am struggling with how to effectively package my writing.
Garden writing has sustained me for 5 years + but now I feel like the well is running dry. My interest and passion for gardening hasn’t waned and the same goes for the act of writing. Â I just don’t know if I can carry the torch for ONG much longer.
Yes, I’ve been known to make declarations in the past only to refute them the next day. And the fact that it is now November and most of the leaves have fallen off the trees isn’t helping. Dark gardening days lie ahead.
But this time it feels different.
I’ve always maintained that my garden writing was simply a diary of what was going on in my own garden. Good and often bad. Sure, from time to time I featured a particular plant or a “best of” list and tried to write in an SEO friendly manner. And yes there were attempts to try and align with certain garden products with a pie in the sky notion about … ahem … making some money with this thing.
But I could never sustain that mindset.
It isn’t who I am as I get very little fulfillment writing in that manner. If I wanted to write a post about my beloved Mets or my love of The Walking Dead or what the family did over the weekend I did so but admittedly was concerned about being “off topic”. I kept telling myself that it was still a gardening blog in the sense that gardening was the predominant topic even if I allowed myself to sprinkle in some outside thoughts along the way.
Now I think I’m ready to flip the switch.
The sprinkling of non-gardening thoughts now becomes the norm. Or maybe a better way to put it is that I want to write about whatever I want, whenever I want. And in doing so, I think I want to put ONG to bed.
My all time favorite website, Grantland, was just killed by ESPN. The site was the perfect mix of sports, pop culture,etc. The stories were typically written in long form, a no-no in today’s short attention span world. An article about the World Series could contain a reference to “The Bachelor” and a Fall TV preview could liken a show to baseball’s Spring Training. Hell, even if I didn’t always get the reference, I respected the writer’s mash-up ability. It was different and refreshing and I’ve been hooked for years.
And that is where I envision this blog heading as I look to the future. A dash of sports and how it infiltrates our daily lives. A dash of the pipeline. A sprinkling of some garden pics. Then a pipeline/garden mash-up rant. I’ll even bore you about what I ate at Wegmans for lunch. And now that I have my GoPro camera, I’m hoping to get wicked creative.
I sincerely apologize in advance for those of you come here just for the gardening. I know I’ll maintain some sort of garden writing presence moving forward but nowhere near where it was in the past. Thank you for all of your days/months/years of support. It was a blast and knowing people actually cared about what I had to say spurred me to keep going.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I have no idea on how to package this new direction. I know the ONG title/moniker will be changed to something else but I have no clue yet as to what it will be. I know that johnmarkowski.com has already been snapped up so I’ll have to get creative.
I hope you stick around …
I am glad you will soldier on, in ANY format. what has kept me here is yout writing STYLE, not just the garden bits. The garden hooked me, but your wit kept me! I will be most certainly a continued follower…
Thanks so much Jana! You are too kind. I’ll do my best to not disappoint.
Dude! Didn’t know you were a Walking Dead fan too! Ping me if you want to strategize – you’re too good at this to let it wither on the vine.
Jeff – we need to talk about the Glen situation stat! Thanks for the kind words.
You’ve always been clear about your varied interests and I can imagine that your close involvement with the pipeline mess and the immediacy of the issues there increasingly demand a shift in emphasis. Like the news columnists who follow their hearts and their shifting interests in choosing what they write, you may want to re-brand your blog but I do hope you continue to share your garden interests. Perhaps renaming and reorganizing the blog using topic-related pages will allow you to write about all your interests while also directing a wider readership to the topics of their particular interest. Good luck with whatever approach you undertake.
Kris – I’d be lying if I didn’t say this pipeline thing has something to do with it. And the gardening thing will never fade, just dialing back the writing part for now. Thanks so much for the ideas and all of the nice words/feedback over the years!
What Jana said! Always enjoy your writing and am happy to see you branching out from gardening, pun intended. 🙂
Thank you Kelli! Well played on the pun!
Good for you, our lives change and we change. The blog will morph and probably become even more popular (I hear us garden bloggers are small potatoes). I’ve been guilty of reading about your pipeline battle but not commenting. Somewhere along the line your blog started to crash my iPad every time I opened it out of the Netvibes reader to comment, so I stopped. Anyway, my heart aches for what you and your family are dealing with, you’re all doing such an amazing job of fighting for what’s right.
Thank you so much Loree! This pipeline is definitely taking its toll and plays a huge part on me wanting to expand/explore other writing avenues. Thank god the gardening love hasn’t been lost because then I would be real concerned.
I originally started reading your blog because you are nearby and have many of the same gardening obstacles I do (deer, clay). However, I also enjoy when you depart from writing about your own garden, especially when you write about and photograph other gardens, but even when you totally depart the subject of plants altogether. It makes me feel as if I have known you forever.
Sharon – thank you so much for reading for all these years and all of your wonderful comments. I took a lot of your advice with the lemon tree and I’m staring at about ten on the tree as I write this. That is what makes this blog so much fun for me.
Hey John~ I’ll stick around if you will !!! 🙂
I will stay if you keep reading Deborah. Thanks as always!
You’re a genuine talent, John, and regardless of the blog’s title, I’m sure I’ll stay a reader. Almost as important, I so hope that some of the speculation I’ve read that Glenn LIVES is true. The rationale for how he could have escaped being devoured by the hoard is marginally believable but I’m willing to be pretty gullible if that’s what it takes!
Good luck with stuff.
Michaele – thank you, yet again, for all of the support! I am convinced Glen is still alive especially after reading how things play out for Glen in the comic.
Just had to track this post down and share the joy…yay, Glen lives…for awhile, at least. I’ve not been a reader of the comic books so it was devouring “grumble threads” that kept my hopes up. Yep, a predicted slightly far fetched scenario turned out to be the exact play out of how Glenn survived.
You’re one of my “must read” garden blogs–you hooked me on grasses with all your wonderful photos. But hey, follow your passion, engage more people, stop the pipeline, and get more kids hooked on that most wonderful of all sports–baseball! I’m in for the long haul to see where you go next.
Thank you Nancy! I will never stop writing/taking photos of my beloved grasses. And always good to know their is someone else who loves baseball!
Hey John,
Please don’t quit! First, I never thought all you wrote about was gardening. It seemed to me you have always tossed in a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Your blog has always made me laugh, (and sometimes out loud), and it has always lifted my spirits. I love your writing style, your passion and your wit.
I don’t care what you write about, I will be hear waiting to read it all.
Linda
*here* 🙂
Wow, thanks so much Linda! I will never stop writing, ever.