Purposeful

I have noticed that some people who are participating in National Blog Posting Month have started to run out of steam. They hastily post short items or things that they think are not well thought out. Today, I'm going to put my teacher hat back on to tell them that they are doing as they should. I taught writing for eight loooooooooooooooooong years (college freshmen can make every minute an eternity) and you know, put together 200+ pages of bullshit they called a dissertation. Plus, I allegedly write every day at my job. So there are my credentials.

I finished my dissertation not because it was fascinating or because my director was retiring, but because I wrote every day (not the first four years, but in the couple of months that led to the defense, I wrote every day). Some days, it was one craptastic idea that got deleted the next day. Some days, pages of words flowed from my fingertips. But the important part was that I paid attention to the project every day. If you are trying to become a better writer, then even those quick posts at 11:45 do something. They stimulate something in your brain so that when you sit down again the next day or the day after that or fifteen years from tomorrow your writing is a little bit better, a little bit closer to something. You will never hear me say that it will be easier or quicker. In fact, the more you know about writing, the harder it is. You can imagine that the freshmen loved to hear that. That's what made it all the more pleasurable to tell them. So the moral is you have to think about why you are posting in order to see what you are getting out of the exercise. For me, it's been about providing my readers with fodder (justifies the polls) and about recording every day in this month (for two years now).

This time last year, the anesthesia was wearing off. And I was about to spend days on the couch. It almost makes me want to count my blessings, and then I remember that I'm going to the doctor for my one year check up on Wednesday to talk about carving up the other foot.