Failed Blog Posts

I've spent the last half hour or so trying to write a blog post about our latest new book list.

A few patrons have noted that the list contained around three times as many non-fiction books as fiction books.  I was going to explain why in a lengthy post, but the answer boils down to me saying "Stuff happens."  Our book suppliers ship books out to us as they get them in stock, etc., and sometimes that means we receive shipments with many more non-fiction books than fiction books, or vice-versa.

There.  That's all I actually needed to write.  But I've got an inflated sense of my own self-importance, and don't think I should be writing blog posts like that.  I want my blog posts to be epic, thought-provoking, and stellar examples of good writing.  How can I possibly achieve those goals with a three sentence blog post?

In any case, after I gave up on the two previous attempts to write that entry, I looked under the "Edit Posts" tab.  There were five saved draft blog posts that I had never deleted.  Two were blank and two were failed first attempts at posts I eventually completed.

The final draft blog post in that folder was one I attempted to write called "The Next Five Years."  In a few weeks, the library board and senior staff members will be meeting with Andy Ackerman to create a strategic plan for the next five years.  Before I started here, the library created a vision pathway which looked to me like a childish drawing full of pie-in-the-sky ideas like a brand new library building with a built-in theatre for presentations (among other things).

I believe our strategic plan will be a little more concrete than the vision pathway.  As part of the preparation for it, I had to answer a bunch of questions about the library's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (to which I wish I had answered "me", "not enough of me", "cloning me", and "meteors" respectively).  At the end, I had to write down one goal for the library in the next five years.

While there are many worthwhile goals we could strive for, I settled on a fairly simple one:  to double our annual in-library visits by 2015.  We had approximately 56,000 visits to the Tumbler Ridge Public Library in 2010.  If Tumbler Ridge grows as many people expect, we expand our collection, and we continue to offer excellent programming, I think this is a reachable goal.

I think that wraps it up for this blog post that was built on the ruins of others.  Perhaps next time I'll have a topic worth writing an epic, thought-provoking post about...