Writing is difficult

I promised a reasonable number of people that I would write blog posts about my bike tour from Copenhagen-Berlin (which was successful, by the way).

I tried to. And I still will. First, however, I will complain about it.

Let’s talk about some of the problems I have encountered:

1. I started writing about the bike tour in a Google Doc while aboard the ferry from Denmark to Germany. This Google Doc is now about 8 pages long, and only covers half the trip. 8 pages is, by my measure, about 6 pages beyond the attention span allocated for this type of post.
2. When I look over what I write everything seems to fall into one of the following categories: too personal, too opinionated, too factual, or too poorly written. What’s the point of writing if you don’t decide who your audience is?
3. Couchsurfing is possibly the most interesting part of my travels, so it makes sense to write about my experience doing so. It is, however, a bit strange to write publicly about real people in too much detail. But without detail, what is the point? Quite a conundrum.

Ultimately, I have decided to publish a higher quantity of shorter, more focused blog posts. In addition, I am also going to worry less about the quality of these posts. I therefore would like to include this waiver stolen from the GNU GPL (with program replaced by post):

BECAUSE THE POST IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE POST, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE POST “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE POST IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE POST PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.