The Challenge of Daily Blogging

I write this as I eat a bowl of raisin bran and type between spoonfuls. The coffee is brewing. It is 5 a.m.

It is a truism among bloggers that if you want to be read, you have to post daily. The demand for content is insatiable especially Monday through Friday when people read at work. The dirty secret of the internet is that it is entertainment for work. Personally, I don't see how people get anything done if their working hours are spent surfing the internet. I'm a blue collar guy, and they don't pay me to surf the internet. They pay me to work. It is obvious to me that white collar types and academics that are able to surf the internet during the day and goof off don't have real jobs. I realize that I am probably pissing off my core audience with these insights, but the only reward I get from maintaining this project is the pleasure of telling the raw, unadulterated truth.

For me, the internet is an after hours thing. I do this gig after work and on weekends. Turning out content for the daily fix is challenging. It is literally a second job for me. Most of the creative part gets done while I drive as I put together the thoughts in my head. I think, gather info, and what have you. I keep notes scribbled on pieces of paper in my wallet. Sometimes, I have complete essays written that I type in later. The result is that no part of my day is wasted. Writers are always writing. I am always getting ideas as I go through my day. The truth is that if I won the lottery or struck it rich, I would still need to work and live the same way I do now because that is where the inspiration comes from.

The blogging habit yields a great deal of flow in my life. It is definitely an autotelic thing. No one makes me blog. I don't get paid to do it. Some would argue that I am wasting my life with this gig. But this gig turns my ordinary days into extraordinary days. For me to stop blogging would require me to turn off my brain. I don't want to do that.

I have other writing projects that I work on. Despite posting infrequently on my fiction blog, I have a large backlog of stories in my notebook I need to key in. Then, there are the book projects. The challenge of it all is getting it all on the page. The reality is that my output exceeds the time I have to put the words on the screen. I always have gas in the tank.

Anyway, the coffee is done brewing. This post took about 20 minutes to write. I have to go work now.

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