Writing Habits
A few months back, an associate asked for a guest blog post from me about an astrological question.(1) The request was thinly veiled attempt to fulfill a desire to post a blog entry a day, and, according to sources, nothing builds traffic as well as guest post from someone else.
I started this web journal as voyage, and as a venue wherein I could experiment and explore, comment on issues, and try out various techniques and bits of prose that didn’t fit any place else.
It collects memories, dreams, and reflections. There’s prose, poetry, fiction, meta-fiction, and astrological observations. Names are frequently removed, but with travel in my blood, sometimes, not so much.
It was a noted, Texas essayist, from a backwater East Texas upbringing who gave me the phrase, “Wrestle the words to the page,” and have that effort give meaning to life, or explicate a situation that defies understanding.
For more than 14 years, approximately 14 years and one month, I’ve had a daily posting here. Almost nonstop.
Write every day? How can you not write every day?
I’m amused by various efforts, “For the next month, I’ll meet this challenge and post every day…”
There was a post-every-day blog challenge, and there was the holiday challenge, and so forth. I used to play along, but that’s cheating for me. It’s not a challenge.
I play with some short fiction, and a blog is an excellent venue to test material. Does it work? Do we care about the character? Is it believable?
Other times, it’s just about fishing, or walking, or what I was thinking when I posted a particular image, from either collection.
When I got serious about writing, I was living in Austin, mostly South Austin, in a time when running a business in trailer was so not cool. It was a place and a time that inspired me. As I’ve drifted further south, still in Texas, maybe 70 miles? I found another place that inspires awe, reverence, and the frequent Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot, too.
Part of what gets my motor running is mere day-to-day observations, mundane as it might look. I have in the past, an I will again, in the future, limit my output so I can finish up another book. Here’s a fun fact, part of the next one has already appeared here.
- (1) I agreed to the post, left town on business, then didn’t get copy turned in quick enough for the publication deadline. That’s the problem with asking you buddy for filler.
N.B., I have some material that doesn’t require a specific date, and I gather enough material like that, ideas, filler, even, and I have that spooled up for days when I need it. For the past few years, the, I rarely work on material more than a week to ten days in advance.
