I am building a lifestyle for myself. It is based on a practice of writing daily. I write a thousand words in my journal every morning. That is an opportunity to record things that I want to remember and limber up my mind for the work of the day. Sometimes I actually undertake writing projects in my journal. For example, when I participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), I do so in lieu of writing journal entries every day.
This is largely a matter of schedule. If I wrote a thousand word journal entry and seventeen hundred words a day on a novel, it would take me about two hours a day. As I work for eight hours a day, five days a week, that would levy a pretty heavy toll on my time.
The other daily practice is writing in my blog. It is a different kind of endeavor. It is measured not in terms of how many words I write, although it is usually between three hundred and a thousand words long. Rather, it is however long it needs to be to get across whatever idea I’m exploring in that particular post.
In short, my blog is an exercise in writing coherent essays to be read by my readers, whoever they might be. I have tried to decide what the theme of my blog is to no avail. It appears that it is a blog about whatever interests me at the moment. The theory there is that I can’t hope to interest anyone else if my topic doesn’t interest me in the first place.
I have written about writing a lot. I have written character sketches and “still life” like sketches of locations. I have serialized a science fiction story. To be fair it was a draft of a story. I have written a good bit about programming because I am passionate about programming. I have written short memoirs of my youth.
I have managed to capture the interest of some people judging by the comments that I get. I try to pay attention to which posts get comments and write more like them. The point of this blog is to learn to write for other people to read.
I guess I’ll end with a tip of the hat to the individuals that inspired me to blog in the first place. First, there is Dave Winer, the man that was so committed to personal commentary that he invented the blog. And then there is Paul Graham, a renaissance man that taught me about lisp and startups and essay writing, all by example. Thanks to them I have found a place from which to start. Only time will tell what this blog becomes.
Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.