Reflecting on one year of Ink Sync

I was surprised to see that my latest “recently inked” post was made over a year since the last one. This ‘Ink Sync’ blog of mine has been going for a whole year now. What insights have I gathered from writing approximately 17,000 words and taking approximately 120 photos? (Just kidding–I have taken many, many more than 120. Photographing things is hard.)

Back before I started this, I had a stationery Instagram account with 0 followers which I did not share with anybody. I was okay with the lack of attention, but I decided to switch to a blog because I wanted a less transient (and less corporate owned) place to archive my photos. I’d just gotten into reading other stationery blogs so I was feeling inspired.

I started out posting reviews, because that’s what most of the blogs I followed were doing–or at least how they framed their posts. This was a bad idea… The blog almost didn’t survive past the first few months.

Stationery reviews are amazing resources and the people who create them for us are incredibly disciplined. But when I’m not actively picking things to buy (which is most of the time), I don’t want to be reading reviews. Reviews are geared towards helping you decide ‘is this thing Worth It or Not Worth It? should I buy this?’ which, in the first place, is not something I am ever asking, but often after reading one I find myself all in a tizzy, re-curating my wishlist and worrying about which inks to add to my collection next for maximum hue-saturation-value coverage.

What I enjoy reading the most in others' blogs is the story attached to a piece of stationery and the unique way in which it has been used. Often when I read reviews I am actually searching for those few sentences of personal response slipped in alongside the informational stuff. That’s also the part that I want to focus on in my own writing.

I’ve moved away from the review framing now and am enjoying myself far more. You can even see the difference in my approach between those two “recently inked” posts–the older one is more formal and informational, the newer is a tour of my notebooks with some subjective comments and anecdotes. I’m going to keep experimenting in the future and make sure I’m only writing about topics that actually inspire me.

I have no engagement metrics on this website and no way to prove that anyone actually reads what I write unless I get a kind comment or two on Mastodon. It’s possible that some of my posts have been read by zero people. Yet I persist. Perhaps at the beginning I had illusions that I would get regular feedback without any extra effort. I know better now, but I’m still not going to put in the extra effort (laughs) I’ve realised that the simple act of running this blog is already satisfying and a great learning experience.

Writing even nominally in public is enough pressure to motivate me to aim for quality. The poor quality of my photos when I started out inspired me to get a DSLR, which got me more serious about my photography hobby in general; that alone has more than paid back the effort of running the blog. And the agony of the cringe whenever I read my older posts motivates me to work on my authorial voice. This is something I want to work on more consciously in the future: storytelling and structure, phrasing things in my own way, taking risks. I’m reading some resources on the topic too, and yes, I have been taking notes with paper and pen. How fun.

Here’s to another year of blogging as a pretext for absolutely anything else!