2013-12-20

Looking Ahead To 2014

As you must certainly already know (ha ha), 2013 is winding down into its final weeks. It is a bit of a tradition for people to do some of their best navel-gazing in such circumstances, and I would like to take full advantage of the excuse.

This blog began its life as a place to collect my thoughts regarding, primarily, economics and politics. Looking back over my first few posts, from May 2010, reveals something unexpected: I spent a lot of time discussing morality. As the years have gone by, I've kept up with that. While I was sure that, for a while, I would be something of an amateur economics blogger, I have been far more consistent on posts about morality, which does happen to be my primary interest.

This is, ultimately, a good thing. I must confess that over the years I have become more and more aware of my shortcomings as an economic thinker. The more I learn, the less certain I am of the things I was initially writing about. The more submerged in the "economics blogosphere" I become, the less inclined I am to write economics posts, or even to comment on the blogs of others. On the other hand, when it comes to morality, my interests really haven't waned at all. Perhaps they have even grown stronger.

It is in light of this shortcoming of economic knowledge that I feel an urge to take this blog in a different direction: More questions, fewer answers. More stories, fewer expositions. More perspective, less opinion.

In short, I'd like this blog to be a little more fun. It's always fun to find out something new about something, but it takes a person much more intelligent than I to articulate opinions in a way that really moves - or at least passably entertains - readers. On the other hand, stories - about my experiences and those of others - have a natural appeal that transcends opinion. Told effectively, stories can inspire opinions and maybe even shape them, without being quite so on the nose as expository writing has to be.

Having said that, I feel that my best accomplishment at the blog this year was my 8W series of posts (a list of which you can find here). It was a great series of workouts and they were a lot of fun to develop. The posts seemed to generate a lot of blog traffic, too. With some effort, I believe I can put together something similar to that every year. (After all, my marathon training series is also available at the same link.) The fitness component of Stationary Waves has always been an important piece of the overall philosophy, although I haven't always made that explicitly obvious. Perhaps it's time I did so.

At any rate, in 2014, here's what I think you have to look forward to at Stationary Waves:

  • Better-quality writing. No more stream-of-consciousness, opinionated, blathering. Well-written blog posts that tell stories and are, I hope, more entertaining to read.
  • More fitness stuff, written the way I like my fitness information. In other words, fitness stuff without all that pesky, cultish marketing language. Just good information pulled from personal experience.
  • Topics of greater interest to the reader. If I write about economics, for example, I'll give you a reason to care about what you're reading.
Hopefully, when I pull it all together, 2014 will be another great year for the blog, but specifically a great year for readers of my blog. I always aim to offer a quality blog-reading experience, but in the coming year I'd like to start writing more about the kinds of things I'd like to read about, and less about whatever happens to pop into my head at the time.

I can't guarantee that I'll succeed, but I can guarantee that I'll try. I hope you'll join me in the process.

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