Blog Like Nobody's Reading

(Hahaha, because in my case, it's true!)

As National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) draws to a close today, I am following today's NaBloPoMo prompt to say what it was about blogging every day that I have been struggling with the most. For me, it was DEFINITELY the whole "quantity over quality" thing. That to me has even been MORE challenging than making the time to blog every day, or finding topics to write about.

Since I write for barely-a-living, I take it extremely seriously, no matter WHERE I do it. Sometimes, in fact, I take it so seriously, that I end up writing nothing at all. (That old perfectionist’s excuse that non-perfectionists find so hard to swallow.) Just as Gustave Flaubert so famously once described his writing process, I’ve also been known to spend “all morning putting in a comma and all afternoon taking it out”. My nitpicking can sometimes be crippling, making the task of even posting to my blog so daunting, I often just leave it altogether instead.

But I really wanted to participate in NaBloPoMo this year. With serious work-related writing deadlines hurtling towards me, I’ve had several legitimate excuses NOT to do it. I knew that I wouldn’t have time to sit here and carefully craft posts of epic proportions. (I would have loved to, but I wisely decided to rather save the internal squabbling over commas for my work writing, otherwise I’d still be stuck around day 2, which would have totally defeated the purpose of this exercise, no?)

This kind of free-styling scribbling that I’ve forced myself to do here has been liberating. Difficult, sure! (Hard to teach an old dog new tricks, after all.) But it definitely has been freeing – and more than a little refreshing - to just WRITE for a change.

Of course, if I were to go back and reread what I have posted on here this past month, I would probably cringe and then just delete the whole batch in one fell swoop. But I’m going to leave it up and proudly pin this badge to this here blog.

I don’t know if I’m going to be keeping up this daily blog revival. Probably not. But hopefully I will be blogging more than just twice a year in future.