Looking for Inspiration

For some time I have been finding it difficult to find a new subject to write about on this blog each week. 

I have been checking other popular blogs, and particularly those I follow, looking for inspiration from what subjects they use.   To my surprise I soon realised that many of the most popular ones mix their personal life with their current hobby interests.

It is also clear that most of the long running bloggers have a wide range of model and wargame interests.   And their blogs follow their various interests, latest products and their latest personal interest.

Unfortunately this research does not help me much, because my own wargame interests are much too narrow to follow their lead.

When I started this blog I had planned to cover all aspects of my wargaming interest.   This is, as the title suggests, Napoleonic wargaming.  However by the time I started the blog I had already decided not to change or increase my collection of model soldiers, but to concentrate on the wargaming aspect.  

From the start this revolved around my 1813 campaign, which is designed to produce battles for Jan and me to wargame.   So most of my earlier posts were about the campaign, the maps and scenery we were scratch building.

However as the campaign grew, and in particular when we changed it from solo to PBEM, I realised I would have to create a separate blog for the campaign.    This was to provide an easy to access diary of the whole campaign and also to make it easy for anyone taking part in the campaign to follow their own campaign phase.

I continued to post on this blog about the campaign, but only to explain aspects of the rules or map making.   Most of this blog relied on inspiration each week.    This worked best when I could come up with something which I could write a series of blogs about.   However lately I find myself looking at a blank page and finding no inspiration at all.

At present I write four blogs each week.  

One is about our hill walking here in Spain.  We run two hill walking groups, and I write a blog about each walk we do.   This involves about 20 photos of the walk and a short description.    We walk on Monday and Thursday, so I usually prepare the blog on Tuesday and Friday.

The 1813 diary is a details record of the campaign.   It covers each phase of the campaign and has a battle report of each wargame.  It is a detailed record of all aspects of the campaign.

These three weekly blogs are quite easy to write.  They rely on recording something which has actually happened.    Being illustrated by photographs they do not require much text.   And I do not have to rely on inspiration for what to write about.

In addition they cover in detail most of what we are doing each week, whether in terms of walking or wargaming.   In many of the other blogs I have researched much of this information would have been included in one blog.

So in future I am going to restructure this blog around my wargame interests – which is our 1813 campaign.   I will cover what has happened in the campaign during the previous week.  But it will not be a detailed factual record, which is already covered in the Campaign Diary blog.   Instead I will give a brief description of what we have done, and then expand to explain the development of rules or how the campaign is progressing.   The aim will be to explain the background rather than record the detail.

I hope that you will find it of interest.