Runaway Future

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been considering a lot in regards to my writing.

Hockey’s Future is and will remain to be an excellent opportunity, even if I feel at times I don’t take full advantage of it.

This blog has also been an excellent output, although it continues to be something I pick at, with fleeting bits of motivation, leaving me with four posts in two days and nothing more for a week. Or two and a half weeks from the looks of it.
I was doing some researching for a forthcoming post on Eklund (yeah, him again, although the mythos has faded tremendously with Sportsnet revealing his face…but that’s a different story). Anyway, I came across Kukla’s Korner and Off Wing Opinion through James Mirtle‘s blog. All three are excellent (in my opinion the best) hockey blogs out there. Kukla actually does it full time and has even been hired on by NHL.com to provide content for them.

This fostered an interesting idea in my head about maybe doing something similar. I would like to leave this blog as is, but maybe to establish a side project that is a bit more professional and something where I’m writing about a topic from a strength.

The obvious topic that rises to the top of the pot is hockey. I wrote a few columns for a fan site on the Ducks a few years back and the switch of perspective from blogging to articles was interesting. I think that might be why I still am an active member of the Hockey’s Future message boards.

That said, the key to a plan like this is a blog with a focused topic, a niche in the industry and intelligent writing. Finding that niche is key. I’m not a hockey insider, but I know and understand the game as well as a lot of the teams. So I can at least make a number of deductions.

The Vote for Rory campaign got me thinking quite a bit about the NHL and marketing, specficially e-marketing, something that really combines my two jobs. In fact, I had the courage to apply for that Columbus job based on those thinkings. I would love to explore that side of things, how the league and new media work hand in hand, and how the league should utilize technology for better marketing initiatives and growth of the game. Some people already talk a lot about this, but it is never a complete focus.

The next obvious niche is prospects, but I am unsure about a blog focusing on that simply because I don’t want to just retread over a lot of stuff I write for HF. Plus, I don’t want one to completely affect the other and I respect the fact that I am in this position thanks to HF’s support. So prospects is something that I don’t see covered a lot out there, but right now I don’t know if I would feel comfortable doing it. HF has previously pondered the thought of having a ‘corporate’ blog almost, but like any other corporate blog, we weren’t exactly sure what the content would consist of and how it would differ but still add to the overall site.

Straying from hockey, another great idea I had would be a topic based blog on the Halifax 2014 Commonwealth Games bid. I’ve been putting more thought into it these days, especially after joining the Facebook group and participating a bit in the discussions there on the bid. Unfortunately, with this idea I have two things working against me.

One, I would be starting halfway or longer through the process. The ideal time would have been right after Halifax won the Canadian bid and highlight the process since then. I could start it now, but it would feel a bit incomplete.

That said, the other worry I have is how it would affect my real job. I have curtailed a bit of my comments in the Facebook group just because I don’t want anything I say to come back to me and bite me in the ass. The truth of the matter is I don’t speak from a much more informed position then anyone else. I just have done some proper research and gone to a few press conferences, plus I am surrounded by the people this will impact the most on a day-to-day basis, the Nova Scotia sport community, so I understand that perspective a lot more. However, I fear that at times I might be stepping out of some boundary and getting myself in trouble by talking about things I have no right to speak about and someone confusing my words with something official. It’s not really that I would fear for my job because of words I say, but a little common sense would save me trouble, especially considering how close I work with the process.

My final idea for a blog is completely different then any of the other ones here. I was thinking that a Global Warming blog would be pretty interesting. I’m not sure if I would be interested in doing it myself, but I think knowing that one exists would be cool. The idea would be basically a map of the world and ‘hotspots’ appear as news stories cover different environmental oddities like extremely warm temperatures, melting ice caps, hurricanes, rains and so on. All tying things together so people can see that the wild swings in temperature we see now are just as related to the problem as the unseasonally warm temperatures we saw earlier this winter.

No one really wants to talk about, but yet everybody is approaching it sideways, with governments revising their environmental policies. It really seems only Al Gore is yelling, but the rest of us are listening, just not sure how to face this change head on.

I mean, really the idea could even be expanded to an End of Times blog, with sort of a Horsemen of the Apocalypse theme, ranking different problems around the world under Pestilence, War, Famine and Death. Not a very happy subject, but it intrigues me as I think about the world that I’m inheriting and the one that the next generation will see. There are many claims of big changes coming within the next 20-30 years, moreso then anything that has been seen in the the past few hundred. It’s interesting, even if it could be our own doom.

I honestly have hundreds of things to write about. My email is full of ideas I’ve emailed myself to cover later (I should write them out, if nothing more then just to practice my writing as advised by the Buddhist writing handbook I just finished (more on that, like everything else, later). I would be lying to say it all comes down to time, because really it doesn’t. I’m starting to realise that if the desire is there and it is well worth it, time doesn’t matter. I’m finding that motivation can always get things done.