Tie Me To The Length Of That Serioulsy Short Leash

I've discovered, during the course of writing my Tumblr blog (note, it sucks up a ton 'o bandwidth, so think long and hard before going there. just sayin') for the past five months or so, that I have two very distinct blogging styles.

Here, I is somewhat long (1/2 to 2 pages in length), while over there, I is painfully short (roughly 3 paragraphs in length). I suppose part of the reason is that it's a recap blog, thus it only needs a few short paragraphs. Sort of like what you see here at the moment. Another part of the reason is that Tumblr is geared more towards pictures/gifs/videos than it is text. Text is almost an afterthought there, whereas here, pics are more of an afterthought than text.

Ya know, I always wasn't this verbose on my Blogger blogs. For those of you who can recall (and that's about all the fingers on one hand), way early on, I used to write short blog posts. I also used to post on a punishing schedule too, but that's another story for not another time. Somewhere along the way, I got away from the short posts and my posts gradually morphed into the type where you will see at least two or three times a month, a jump break inserted into said post.

The only legitimate reasons that I can come up with as to why the excess verbiage are basically this:

1} Real world has bled into my blog world;
2} Chat rooms of yesteryear has also bled into my blog world.

Second point first. As most of you know, I trolled the chat rooms for roughly 4 year. One of the many, many things that bugged me (and there were a lot), was the 1500 character limit for posting. It has always been a problem of mine writing stuff that can smartly sum up a point in under a half page (which is why I stay away from writing short-short fiction), so it seriously chaffed my inner thighs to be under an arbitrary word limit. So when I decided to move to the blog world, out went the word cap.

First point second. As most of you know, I work for the state of Connecticut and have been since 1996. And as anyone who has ever dealt with the guv'ment on any kind of level, you know that any documentation that you receive during your encounter is basically information overload with a three page minimum. This is directly due to the fact that no one, repeat, no one wants to crucified over a minute slipup that an unscrupulous person (public or private sector) would take advantage of.

Because of this very real outcome (personal experience here), I have a tendency to do ginormous info dumps that the average person would only see in a badly written novel in my internal business correspondence. External only requires that you provide short succinct answers to any question posed in an e-mail, and no tangent straying. Ever.

So because of those two points, I have issues when it comes to writing blog posts. Such as this one, which probably meets the low end of my estimated length (to verify, do a print preview of just this post and nothing else). I'm working on it, but it will always be a perpetual uphill battle.

A question for you: Does any of what you do in the real world for non-story writing bleed into what you write for blog posts?

(c) 2015 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved.