After two months of not writing for Just a Gwai Lo, I still haven't come up with anything important (urgent!) to write about. Quality control needs improving, and the best idea I could come up with was to hire an editor. Which would mean, in essence, paying someone to tell me what to write about.
(How many blogs are edited in the traditional sense? With assignments, deadlines, correction, feedback, rejection? Has the nature of editing and roles of editors changed because of blogging? Are individual editors relevant anymore that we "crowdsource" the process?)
While on 'hiatus' here, I've written about floorball and other topics at Urban Vancouver, and kept posting to improvident lackwit (Heckhole, Lord Palmerston, Crazy Town, and today, Tiananmen Square). I thought about news that matters to me: it needs to be local, match my interests without perpetuating tunnel vision, be "actionable" and allow me to "add value" to it, among the other features listed in Dave Pollard's piece on continuous environmental scan. I successfully pursued outdoor exploits, regained if not my figure then at least a better outlook about it, created about the same, which is to say not a whole lot, moved from del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia, kept up with Twitter, Vox, NowPublic and Flickr but gave up on Facebook, at least for the moment.
Sharing still doesn't feel as meaningful as creating, though. So what's a person who doesn't feel very creative to do? At least be grateful that the flow of work email shows no signs of letting up?