Total Bloggage

There is some wargaming in there somewhere!

I have far too many blogs. 18 Wargames ones. Two non wargames ones under this incarnation (one is under construction) and two blogs under another incarnation which mainly feature pictures of naked women and me ranting about transport and foreigners so would not be of interest to wargamers.

Now, I started blogging in November 2005 with my Spartans blog. The purpose of the process was to discipline me into concentrating on one army and putting my finished units up one by one to encourage me to do more. My problem having always been that I want armies for everything and so I can't focus. I'd love to be someone who just does one thing (like the man in Italy who painted a 1:1 Roman Legion) or even someone who has a main period and then 1 or 2 subsidiary period (yes, Giles, like you!). But no. I'm working on over 30 WAB armies plus dozens of others from prehistoric times through to World War 2. Given that only two men in my family have ever lived past 50 (I'm 49!) the chances of finishing any are negligible but I keep starting new ones.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that I am more of a painter than a wargamer. I very rarely go to Guildford Wargames Club (2 or 3 times a year, maybe) so I don't feel the need to get armies finished. it's a vicious circle really. I don't have any complete armies to field so I don't play very often.

So the disciplining effect of having a blog to make me concentrate was doomed and instead I just proliferated blogs. This would be fine but a weird thing happened: people started to look at them. Oddly, I hadn't considered that; they really were supposed to be for me. Somewhere I could store information on units and points values etc. together with links to other websites I found useful. But he Sudan blog has averaged 2,500 views a month over the last two years and this one averages 1,200 a month. The Cavegirls blog (yes, I know it is only marginally about wargaming!) has had over 100,000 visits in just under two years. One of my other incarnation's blogs had reached a third of a million views and was getting 1,200 visits a day. This latter one, however, was recently deemed "objectionable" after a complaint to Blogger (because I wrote a not very enthusiastic piece about Michael Jackson, I suspect) and now only gets 12 a day because a lot of office software blocks blogs labelled "objectionable" by Blogger . The point being, that at some point I realised I had an audience and felt compelled to add content to service it.

I realised today that I haven't updated three of my blogs since 2008 and I was thinking about what I could paint to give them another entry. In other words, the existence of the blogs is driving my painting! So expect something on Darkest Africa, Swashbucklers and Byzantines in the next few weeks. Perhaps the best solution would be to do my one unfinished figure a week for these unloved blogs.