Why the Blog Went Quiet

When I opened The Joinery I had no idea how to promote a woodworking shop. I’d spent my career in entertainment technology and forty years making furniture, but I’d never run a business that lived or died on whether strangers walked through the door. The one thing I knew how to do was write, and tell a story. So that’s where I started.

The early posts were the story of the place. What a shared shop was, what you could expect if you joined, why anyone would want to. I had fun. I’d forgotten how much I liked sitting down with a blank page and figuring out how to say a thing clearly.

Then I looked at where the members were actually coming from, and it wasn’t the blog. It was word of mouth and Reddit. People talking to people. So I did the sensible thing and pivoted — wrote less about the story and more about what I thought would help the people already here. How to keep the dust collection running. Why we bought the 20-inch planer. I started a newsletter that pulled from the blog and went out every Sunday morning. More people read it that way. Still not many.

Then we moved to the bigger shop, and everything got busy. Membership grew. The space doubled and so did the upkeep. More members meant more tool damage, more questions, more of me running around fixing things. The writing became the thing I threw together Wednesday night because it was supposed to go out Thursday. It had been the part of the week I looked forward to. Now it was a chore, and one that, as far as I could tell, almost nobody was reading.

It came to a head on a Thursday evening. I was already late posting, and a blog post was the last thing I wanted to make. It had been a bad day at the shop — a string of tools broken by people who didn’t know how to use them, and me out of patience and in no mood to sit down and write something motivational. I did it anyway. Threw a post together, put it up, and forgot about it.

The next morning my own newsletter landed in my inbox, the way it does for everyone on the list, and I read what I’d written. It didn’t ring true. It wasn’t encouraging, even though encouraging was the whole point of it. It was just words I’d assembled to fill a Thursday. And sitting there reading it, I asked myself the question I’d been avoiding: why am I doing this at all, when I have so many other things that actually need me?

I didn’t have a good answer. So I stopped. Not in a dramatic way — I just decided anything not directly serving the shop had to go, and the blog quietly became a place to post announcements. Class is open. Shop’s closed Monday. That kind of thing. It stayed that way for the better part of a year.

Here’s the part I’ve only recently been honest with myself about. I didn’t actually stop writing during those months. I write most weeks. Journal entries, notes on whatever I’m building, a woodworking log I keep in an app I’m putting together. The writing never went anywhere. What went away was letting anyone see it.

And that turns out to be the whole thing.

I spent a long time in live entertainment. Touring shows, music videos, Broadway, and also state fairs and high school musicals. Most of them very successful, some of them not so much. Either way you’re putting work in front of a room and watching what happens when it lands or doesn’t. You learn something in that world that’s hard to unlearn: making the thing and showing the thing are not the same act, and the second one is where it gets real. A piece of furniture in my own shop is just a piece of furniture. The same piece in someone else’s house, being used, getting scratched, that’s different. Writing is the same. A page in my journal is for me. A page somebody else reads is doing something else entirely.

For most of those quiet months I told myself the question was about audience. Who is the blog even for? Members, who mostly already know me? The general public, who’s never heard of a shared shop in Middleton, Wisconsin? Or is it just a tool to fill classes, in which case why dress it up as writing at all. I had three answers and I kept switching between them, and switching between three answers is its own way of not answering.

I think the real question was simpler and I didn’t want to look at it. It wasn’t who the writing was for. It was whether I was willing to be seen doing it. The journal is safe. Nobody grades it. Putting it on the blog means somebody might read it and think it’s thin, or wrong, or not worth their time. The honest reason the blog went quiet isn’t that I got busy, though I did. It’s that retreating to the private version was easier, and easier felt a lot like sensible.

But here’s what I keep coming back to. Even when only a few people read something, the fact that they read it at all is the best part. Somebody cared enough to notice. They tell you that you got it right, or that you got it wrong, or that a thing you said made them go out and build a step stool. That feedback, good or bad, is the part that has ever meant anything to me. You don’t get it from a journal.

So I’m starting again. Not as a marketing plan this time — just the writing.

I’ve spent forty years paying attention to this stuff. How much wood movement actually matters to a given project, and when I’m just worrying about it for no reason. How somebody who’s never held a chisel turns into somebody who trusts their own hands. When a power tool is the right call and when, every so often, it isn’t — because I’ll reach for the machine most days, but there are jobs a hand tool still does better and I want to be honest about which ones. I have opinions about all of it, and the strange thing is I’m not always sure what they are until I write them down. That’s what this is for. I want to know what I actually think before I’m done thinking it. If it’s useful to you, good. If it isn’t, the finding out was still worth it to me.

I don’t know yet whether I’ll keep it up. I said I loved this last time too, right before I let it turn into a chore and then into nothing. The difference, as far as I can tell, is that I’ve stopped asking who it’s for. Maybe that’s enough to make it stick and maybe it isn’t. I guess we’ll both find out.