Ahhh damn you! Goddamn you all to hell!

So my phone decided to focus on all the pollen and bullshit the Santa Ana winds put on my windshield, but look past it and you may quiver with

…pation.

“Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”

I had this idea in December to post at least one thing a day in my blog.

I post a lot of stuff on my Tumblr, share a lot of pictures on my Instagram, put videos on my YouTube channel, and do dumb things every day with Twitter. I’m also starting a regular thing on my Twitch channel (more on that later), so I can honestly say that I produce a lot of content or at least share a lot of content online. But it feels like my blog, which is where the whole thing started, is largely neglected, because I feel like I can only post bigger things or deeper things or heavier things here.

So I’m giving myself permission to post whatever the hell I want, so I can just get past the internal gatekeeper slash critic who prevents me from using the one space on the Internet that is entirely mine.

Therefore: I hereby challenge myself to post one thing a day during the month of December, no matter what it is. It can be a picture, a few lines from a work in progress, a video, a collection of links to things, or even just one link to one thing.

I did it, and it was an interesting exercise. It helped me change my routine, shake loose some stuff in my head, and it did get me back into a mindset that I was in over a decade ago, when I would look at everything around me as a potential source of inspiration for a blog post. In that sense, it was helpful. But it didn’t make it easier to post quick dumb stuff, like I thought it would, and having something new here every day did not seem to make a difference in the readership stats in a positive or negative way. In that sense … well, it wasn’t worth the effort. But I think that these obvious things aren’t equal, and the seemingly intangible benefits that came with thinking like a writer every day outweighed the lack of tangibles like increased readership or reach. I’m sure someone has already done the obligatory Medium thinkpiece on this sort of thing, so that’s all I think I have to say about it.

I did experience a fundamental shift in my writing and how I chose to invest my creative energy, and that change was not good. I went from working on one of a couple different writing projects every day, to not working on them at all. I was putting my thought and time and energy into blog posts, and all I have to show for it is a little over a month of stuff that just sort of takes up space, instead of a finished rewrite, and a completed first draft.

I’m not saying that there isn’t anything good in the stuff I wrote here over the last fifty-ish days, just that the good stuff would probably have found its way here, anyway, and the stuff I look at as filler was just a way of avoiding the rest of the work. Maybe I needed a vacation, and wasn’t willing to give it to myself. I don’t know. Feeling like a fraud and a failure takes up a lot of time and energy, and it clouds my judgement and perspective.

Anyway, I’m retroactively giving myself permission, beginning Saturday, to go back to posting in my blog from time to time, when I have something that I feel like I need to say, instead of every day no matter what.

Now I’m going to get back to work on this rewrite, because I did about 1100 words on it yesterday, and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed living in that world. I’d forgotten how good it feels to make a big pile of words and then carve a story out of them.