I have been posting daily for two years
Damn! I hit two years! I still can't recommend doing this!
I started posting daily in 2024, around the time that the world's best/only worthwhile social media platform, Cohost, announced that it would be shutting down. You can see 2025's recap, after my first year of constant blogging, here.
In 2025 I mentioned that I'd started off strong in 2024 and kept a 4-6 day headroom of scheduled posts for many months. This eroded entirely in late 2025 and early 2026, when I was laid off. It turns out that my lunch breaks were the load-bearing habit in my life that was making my blogging (and blog-reading) easy and fun. When I was rewriting Possessors in 2025, having something else to go write or read during long writing days was really refreshing. I find that the more you write, the more things you have to say. Blogging was a great steam release valve.
Getting laid off in Sept/Oct (I forget the exact date??? Wow!) was massively disruptive to my life, though not in the ways you'd expect. I had been preparing to leave my company for a long time - after shipping Skin Deep, my husband and I agreed that we would like to work together on the next game, and I had long term plans to go do that instead. Getting laid off just accelerated a timeline I was already mostly financially prepared for.
It has been immensely strange, however, to finally find myself not working for a boss after 15 years of always, always working for a boss. On top of that, the game we're currently making at Blendo is in pre-production, which is something I'm also pretty unfamiliar with. Most games writers don't get hired during pre-production. Right now, I'm working part time as a producer on that game and barely doing any narrative work at all. It's been difficult for me to know how to structure my time on a game that doesn't actually need that much time from me yet.
The result of all this is that I spent late 2025 and most of 2026 slamming together a schedule out of part-time contract work - on Pathologic 3 and Young Suns - while struggling to figure out how to split my time and my attention without the pressure of a boss breathing down my neck. It's unusual!! I'm not used to it!!
Starting in 2016, I had a part-time job nearly all the time alongside my day job. I found the day job to be an incredible motivator. I would work long nights and weekends and split my attention across two or even three projects without a lot of struggle. At Riot, I spent a lot of time on the Forge team, where I was acting as the publisher-side narrative lead and overseeing narrative quality and IP compliance on eight indie games at once. Sometimes I even wrote on those games while also remaining available to give notes on all the other ones at once.
It was easy for me to do all of this. I had strict expectations - or I could divine expectations from the mysterious whims and humors of the company at large, which is something you tend to get better at the more time you invest in Being A Corporate Goon. I find it very easy to split my attention when I can figure out my team's expectations.
But when I'm not sure what the best use of my time is, splitting that time is a lot harder. In particular, having no day job to "rebel" against with side projects and hobbies has been a total head trip.
One of the consequences of all this was that my blogging has no structure at all anymore. I struggle to write these posts, sometimes, but I get enough satisfaction out of it that I'm still barely holding on. Most of the time I now write the blog post on the same day I need to post it. This would have terrified me in 2024, but now it's the norm.
I will admit: my definition of "today" has changed. I often end up posting several minutes or even an hour or more after midnight because I start writing the post after 11 PM. I then date it to whenever I started writing it. I'm allowing myself to do this and I feel no guilt about it. If you're judging me on the purity of my daily blogging, I'm probably a disappointment to you now!! My definition of "today" is now basically "between sleeps."
I have woken up after falling asleep by accident to write blog posts at midnight, though!! It's rough!!
I still do find it invigorating - like I said, the more you write, the more you have to say. I am getting something out of this. But like before, I'm still not going to think too hard about it, or about what I'm getting out of it.
I have wondered if the blogging is in fact getting in the way of other writing I have to do. I don't know! I'll have to think about that in 2026 and 2027.
We are very very lucky to have gotten funding for the next Blendo game and to be in the process of making it. I feel insanely unworthy all the time. The blogging I do here probably does not reflect any of the weird emotional rollercoaster shit I've been going through around work, habits, writing, or my profession. It's very odd to look back at the stuff I wrote in the last year and to see the ways in which it is and isn't diaristic. I mentioned this recently, but my Letterboxd feels more diaristic to me than this blog does.
In fact, the most personal stuff I wrote got hackernews paying attention to me, which wasn't at all even a little bit fun. I will be completely honest: it has turned me off from writing diaristic things about my actual life!
The fact is that most of my readers come here through the Bear Blog discover page, where they're clicking straight through instead of using an RSS reader. I want to reiterate everything I said about the Discover Page last year: I hate it! It's crazy bad! Every time I go there I see stuff that was probably rewritten by AI... or, more often, people engaging in some kind of sad, weird, miserable metablogging debate. Like, people fighting about blogging.
I can tell that most of the people reading my site do not use an RSS reader to get to me - it's Discover or some other link aggregator site. It makes me curious whether this audience's experience of blogs/websites/"the indie web" is entirely through aggregators, where they're sifting through huge piles of stuff they don't care about - or even hate - to find the stuff they like.
They didn't leave social media at all! They are just building smaller social medias for themselves.
And then it makes me wonder: do they even know about RSS? It would be kind of crazy for these bloggers to not know about RSS, but they don't seem to be using RSS to get to my site... so I can't make assumptions here, can I??
This could turn into a whole post where I explain RSS, but I am too tired to pull that off. It's enough to say that RSS is a magical way of reading only the sites you find edifying, and none of the sites you don't. It allows you to approach each site individually, without a popularity number attached to it. That number is dogshit! Stop thinking of Bear as a social media platform. Bear is a service that hosts websites. You are not required to be in community with all the people in the world who have websites generally. Just get an RSS reader!
Maybe you will stop getting into meta-fights if you use an RSS reader, eh?? Maybe then I will want to read your blog!! Because you won't be using it to get in soul-sucking fights anymore!!
Out of all the link aggregators I've seen linking to me, the Discover users are the most far along in the process of welding themselves into a kind of ass-backward social media platform. They have a very homogenous sensibility. (The Discover readers, not the Bear posters.) I can tell in advance which posts they'll like. If I write about my career or my craft or the things I'm actually interested in, they probably won't react particularly strongly. If I write some context-free thing about tech or the internet, they go nuts for it.
I feel pretty ambiguous about this. I'll just say that I have strongly considered blocking all my posts from the Discover page. But then when I think about that, I just wonder: maybe I'd be better off leaving Bear entirely!! So that's percolating in the back of my mind.
Anyway: blogging every day is an exercise in Having A Habit. But I can only maintain so many habits, and most of my slots are taken up by things like "personal grooming" and "doing my laundry" and "RTOing myself". My limits are pretty tight, these days.
I'm struggling!! Don't do this! It's not valorous. Again: if I think about it too much, I'll just stop!!