As part of blog series or e-book compilations, people sometimes ask me to answer questionnaires they've put together. Sometimes they mention the size of their audience. Sometimes, they focus on our shared interests.

On one hand, it's good that other people are putting together resources, and sometimes these things lead to interesting new conversations. On the other hand, grist for another's mill, and I generally don't enjoy reading short, too-standard answers.

So if I'm going to do stuff like that, I want to focus on the things I like. I never promise to write answers, and I don't commit to a specific date. I mull over the questions and cherrypick the ones I find interesting. Not very generous of me, I suppose, but it keeps me happy. <laugh>

People are usually curious about the past: how one got started, what was helpful, what would you change. I tend to focus more on present and near-future, since that helps me a lot, and I'm not quite ready to hold my life up as an example that other people should be inspired by or follow. It's good to take notes along the way, though, since it's hard to reconstruct from memories afterwards.

So I'm okay with describing things and I can see the value of having a gallery of different approaches… What's the core of this, then? Maybe I'm not keen on the Q-and-short-A format. Might as well be a sketch so that I can practise that. Might as well try to wring out ideas for the future, notes to self – which don't make as much sense outside the context of my blog, I guess.

Hmm. I think there might be something there. In the context of my blog, it's clearer that life is a work in progress, and people can come across updates. I can link to things back and forth, and it's easier for me to keep track of comments.

I like it when people link to or excerpt my blog posts, since most of the time, bloggers make it easy to get back to the context. They put more of themselves into the post, too, sharing what they liked or what they think. It's different from having a short bio at the end.

Oh! Maybe that's something else that's playing into this… I tend to feel meh about most of the guest posts I read, the generic-ish articles with short bios written for link-building and audience-building purposes. We might be a small tribe, but it's okay for us to grow slowly through remarkable ideas rather than from exposure.

So I'll still take people's questions under advisement, but I'll reflect on those questions on my own schedule and to the extent that I want to, and I'll share those reflections on my blog. If people want to excerpt/link back, they're welcome to do so. Let's try that out…