A Reply for Dan

Hobby?  Not really.  But Dan made Wylio.com, which is cool.

I had dinner last night with my college roommate/best man and his wife.  Over the course of the evening's conversation, he asked me how my quest to write 52 blog posts this year is going.  I started to answer, got distracted (me?  imagine!) and never got around to answering the question.

The answer is that it's not going well, because the vast majority of what I write I never publish.  Almost everything on this blog in the past 3 years (admittedly, not that much) is something I wrote in 5 minutes and published immediately.  Anything that takes longer never gets published.  Some of that is distraction (me?  distracted?) but mostly it's that the more I look at something I write, the more problems I find with it.

Right now I'm functioning more as an editor than a writer.  It hasn't always been this way, but we are indeed shaped by our work.  The longer I look at something I write, the more work that I think it needs before it's worth sharing.  This is a pretty drastic change from earlier in my life, where I was much more careless with my words.

The only way (thus far) I've successfully broken the cycle is to publish without thinking too much about it.  So that's what I'm going to try for a while.  I'll start by going back through the hundreds of "draft" blog posts I have on Blogger, and picking a few to publish.

We'll see how it goes.

Three down, 49 to go.