As many of my longtime readers know, shortly after this blog began in early 2004, I created a regular feature called the Saturday Six.
It was a weekly list of six random questions that sometimes related to the same topic and sometimes didn’t. After years of the Saturday Six, and you can do the math on the number of questions that required me to come up with week after week, I felt like it was no longer getting the comments to warrant continuing with it. So, on November 29, 2014, it ended with its 555th and final edition.
Several months later, on July 11, 2015, I tried to resurrect the name with a different format: six weekly links about which I’d provide “short takes”  of commentary. That didn’t seem to go anywhere, and after a few attempts, I quietly retired that “reboot.”
Then I had a thought: if coming up with six questions had become too difficult, couldn’t I at least come up with one per week? I thought I could and so on December 6, 2015, The Big Question made its debut. I gave it 20 weeks, and in many of those weeks, the question didn’t get a single response. Those “big questions” weren’t big enough, I suppose.
Then I came up with Saturday Coffee, which was intended to be a sort of a hodgepodge, catch-all topic in which I could talk about anything. I launched it, with something of an explanation piece, on May 2, 2015. There were some editions that I was particularly pleased with, and there were a few decent discussions on a handful of them.
But the ones in which people responded could just as easily have been presented as single posts outside of a franchise title like “Saturday Coffee.”  In fact, I didn’t feel like that title really explained anything to anyone who might have stumbled across the blog and found a piece they might have been interested in. “What’s ‘Saturday Coffee’ mean?” I could picture them asking.
So lately, I’ve been experiencing a strange kind of Blogger’s Block. Not the kind that happens when you feel like you don’t have anything to say, but rather the kind that happens when you feel like there’s a major stumbling block that’s damming up the river. This post could have been branded as a “Saturday Coffee” post, but it’s about blogging, so I’m just running it at a post about blogging in the Blogging category.
Suddenly, the roadblock is gone. As a result, I have a post of just more than 500 words about the various roadblocks I’ve managed to construct for myself as I’ve tried to find some clever way to provide you with hopefully enjoyable content on Saturdays.
Roadblock? A struggle to post.
Roadblock gone? Five hundred words just like that.
The moral of the story, then, is that as a blogger, you have to be willing to experiment and willing to tweak. And once in a while, you have to be willing to admit some experiments just don’t work and reconoiter.
So we’ll press on every Saturday with a new post…and without a franchise title. Let’s see how that goes!
