One year of daily blogging
As of yesterday, I have completed one year of blogging once a day - September 16 to September 16. My first post of the year was here.
I want to resist the urge to do a big big post about this because one of the reasons I was able to do it at all was by not thinking or worrying too much about it. I did not set a goal for myself and I did not permit myself to think of it as a project.
I still do not. It's merely something I am doing, like my Letterboxd, where I've been recording every movie I've seen since late 2018. I intend to continue this until it becomes impossible for me to keep it up. I cannot predict what would cause such a breakdown, but I accept that it could happen. At this point, it would have to be something medical.
The same goes for the blogging. I'm not going to set limits or goals for myself, and I'm not going to set a minimum floor of quality for either of these things. Sometimes my Letterboxd review is only a couple of words. Sometimes a blog post is just a youtube video. It's okay. It doesn't have to be a whole damn production.
Before September 16 2024, I was putting at least the same amount of energy into microblogging, and chosting, and whatever. I thought that if I used that energy for something else, it would not be a burden on my life. It was merely a change of targets for energy that I was already spending. And I was right! To some extent, I am only doing this in order to make myself so busy that I do not have time to look at social media.
I've mentioned this before, but I write many of the posts in advance and I rarely, if ever, write a post on the day that I post it. I'm most comfortable when I get a chance to queue up 4-6 posts over the weekend and build a buffer to get through the beginning of the week. This doesn't happen as often anymore, but it still happens.
Lately it's gotten a little harder for me. I've been very busy with a variety of family and social commitments. On top of that, I've been shipping or preparing to ship a lot of games. But it remains sustainable, because I always did have this much extra time, really. I was just using it on dumb shit.
I will say one spicy thing: I rarely look at the Bear Blog discover page because I feel like every time I look at that ranking list, I see a lot of people who are trying to get comfortable writing more... but are often writing about writing, or about blogging specifically, or about motivation and shit like that. I cannot stress this enough: you did not start blogging to blog about blogging, I guarantee it. (And if you did, you should probably just stop!)
Unless you want to run out of things worth saying, you should try to write about specific, concrete, identifiable things that you are interested in, or things you're doing, or other events in your life.
I won't get into it in depth here, but this kind of navel-gazing blogging-about-blogging writing is self-help flavored to me, and self-help writing is so scammy and unpleasant that I want nothing to do with it. There is nothing actually moral or positive or socially productive about writing every day. I do not even write every day. I find it easier to write a lot when I don't write every day. I write professionally, I've written on like 15 different videogame productions, and some days my job just requires me to go to meetings all day! This is fine and normal.
What I'm doing here is stupid, and you shouldn't do it if it's too hard for you. Personally, if I start thinking about it too hard, I'll probably stop!