Brevity, my elusive friend...

I have fallen prey to one of the many clichés of blogging, developer friends. In the beginning, there seem to be far too many spectacular ideas and so little time, but before you know it, there's just this nagging thought in the back of your mind: "Oh yeah... I haven't done a post in a while, have I?"

Now, there are always several reasons any good procrastinator can give you for putting things like this off, but probably the biggest for me is the apparent inability to be brief.

Just today I told myself I was going to fire off a concise email about a design issue I wanted to discuss with my co-workers. Straight. To the point. Just the facts, m'am. And, after about a screen length of text, I figured I'd pretty much covered it.

Was it helpful for me? Undoubtedly. Writing helps me to work through ideas. I notice problems and solutions more easily than if I was just sitting there thinking. But did my co-workers need to go through the same thought process? Probably not.

When it comes to writing a blog post, something I don't really have to do, knowing that I'm probably going to go on forever about something is a good recipe for stalling.

On the art side, I've been exploring setting arbitrary limits in order to be able to still make stuff in this world of infinite possibility. I think I'll apply that to this blog as well. So here goes: this and the next 10 posts will all be under 300 words, no matter what. There, I've said it. Give me brevity, or give me backspace! (272 words)