I admit, National Blog Posting Month is kicking my ass.

Part of the issue is finding the time to write. Here’s a rough accounting of my daily routine:

• Wake up at 5am
• At my desk with a cup of coffee and writing in my notebook at around 5:20am
• Finish writing at around 6:20am-6:30am
• Study German and Japanese until 7am
• Leave for work at 7:10am
• Work from 7:10am to around 4:15pm
• Come home 15 minutes later, change into my workout clothes and start my workout at around 4:30pm
• Shower, make my post-workout shake, and relax by watching TV, starting at around 5:15pm and going until dinner
• Cook dinner and eat it, 6pm to 7pm
• Write???
• Go to bed at around 8:30pm to 9pm

It’s a bit after 7:30pm as I’m writing this now, and my eyes are heavy, I’m tired, and I want to go to bed. It doesn’t help that I didn’t sleep well last night. I’ve been having trouble sleeping all year, and I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to go to bed earlier and earlier so I can get as much sleep as I could. Frankly, I need 8-9 hours of sleep a night or I’m miserable. And I feel miserable tonight.

I’m trying to build this second writing habit, and quitting now isn’t going to help me. I. Must. Keep. Going.

Warren Ellis wrote about the zero draft last week. The zero draft

is the draft you will never show anyone. It’s the draft you know is wrong but which contains the bare bones and meat-scraps of the story you’re trying to write. Get to the end of the zero draft, wait a day, and then go back and make it readable to other humans and fix all the egregiously wrong stuff, and that’s your first draft. Zero drafts are always too short: they fill out in the process of revising into a first draft. Stop thinking about your first draft as a first draft, call it a zero draft, and you give yourself permission to just slap everything you’re thinking about on to the page, knowing you can fix it before you have to inflict the draft on some other poor bastard.

I like this a lot. This is my zero draft. All the posts I’ve written for NaBloPoMo thus far feel like zero drafts to me. Sitting down at 7pm to write something and posting it online an hour later doesn’t feel like it deserves to be more than just a zero draft. Am I being too hard on myself? Maybe.

Did I mention I’m tired?

Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Maybe I’m trying to bite off more than I can chew. I did give this project very little thought, after all. Writing is something I love, though, and I want to work on being a better writer. But when I have bills that need to be paid and a life that wants to be lived… it’s tough. It’s really tough.

Earlier today, I opened Capture One on my Mac. Capture One is a photo editing application, very similar to Lightroom. I am and have been a Lightroom user for years, and I haven’t had any inkling to change that, but when I opened Capture One, I decided to play with it. I don’t remember why I opened this application or the circumstances that led to it, but I have to admit, I had fun with it. I grabbed a random Fuji RAW file from my hard drive and played with the tools, learned the interface, made my edits, and in all, I found the entire experience to be nice. Thoughts started swirling around in my head, and I started asking myself, Should I switch to Capture One from Lightroom?

Concurrently, I had been toying with the idea of incorporating Obsidian into my workflow in some way. Obsidian is a very powerful tool for those who keep and work with Markdown files, like I do. I had been and still very much am a loyal user of iA Writer. iA Writer, in my opinion, provides the best writing experience of any writing app I have ever used. I am using iA Writer to write this post right now, and it’s the app I have used to write every blog post I’ve written since my return to blogging in 2020. Quite simply, I love this app.

But…

Obsidian is so nice! I love how it displays my Markdown files with its own “Live Preview” editing mode, I love how fast it is, and I love its vast amount and variety of community plugins. It’s a really nice app, and I really like it, but unlike with Capture One, I don’t have to migrate from iA Writer to Obsidian. I can use both concurrently, and I really like that. The only change I had to make was with my folder structure, and that was because my document folders were scattered all over the place, and that didn’t quite jive with Obsidian’s “Vault” concept. So I reorganized my files, and neither Obsidian or iA Writer cared.

My toying around with both Capture One and Obsidian had got me thinking about my tools again. A few months ago, I returned to using Scrivener because I missed a few of its more powerful features, something iA Writer didn’t have, and that experience has been fine, great even. I use Panic’s Nova to write all the code for this website, and I use Things to manage all my tasks. All these apps—these tools—are great and all, but at the end of the day, I have to sit down and do the work.

I’m a nerd, and I love playing around with new tools, with old tools, with tools in general, but these tools are meant to help me get work done. I can’t be like Julian Simpson and obsess over my tools, but I can be like Julian Simpson in the sense that he gets so much work done. Switching over to Capture One isn’t going to make me a better photographer, just like switching back to Scrivener isn’t going to make me a better novelist. At the end of the day, I have to use my tools to get work done, and I want to get work done.

In a lecture titled The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art Over Nations, John Ruskin had this to say about art:

Wherever art is practised for its own sake, and the delight of the workman is in what he does and produces, instead of in what he interprets or exhibits,—there art has an influence of the most fatal kind on brain and heart, and it issues, if long so pursued, in the destruction both of intellectual power and moral principle; whereas art devoted humbly and self-forgetfully to the clear statement and record of the facts of the universe, is always helpful and beneficent to mankind, full of comfort, strength, and salvation.

I admit I’m not one who reads John Ruskin in my free time (though I have read a few of his books). This section was quoted in Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson Jr., a book I finished last month and loved. Around that time, I had been thinking about the role of writing in my life. To be more specific, I had been thinking about this tension I had between writing in my journal versus writing the novels and essays I considered to be more serious, and thus more worthy of my time. I hesitate to call it easy, but I can easily make myself sit at my desk with my pen and notebook and spend the next hour writing pages and pages about anything—about what’s in my head, what I’m feeling, what’s going on in my life. But once I intend to write my novel or work on an essay, I struggle. I struggle to make myself go to my desk, to open my notebook or my laptop, and simply write.

Why is this? Is it that one is something I do just to do—as John Ruskin says, practised for its own sake—and the other is destined for a bigger purpose, which is to be read by other people, to be judged by people like John Ruskin?

What is my best writing?, I remember asking myself. I used to think that writing something personal, something from the heart, will be considered “good.” That I might consider that my “best” writing. But then I started to question things. Personal doesn’t mean good, but something good can be personal, I wrote in my notes. Something honest doesn’t mean good, but something good can be honest. And on and on my thoughts went. Instead of getting to the bottom of it, I think I binged another TV show and went to bed.

And now I’m here.

I don’t know the answers, but what I do know is that I disagree with John Ruskin. Art practiced for its own sake is “helpful and beneficent to mankind,” even, or especially, if it’s just me. Journaling is something that has benefited me in ways I can’t measure, except in this one way: it has kept me alive. That is not hyperbole. I would not be here if it wasn’t for my writing. I do agree that “art devoted humbly and self-forgetfully to the clear statement and record of the facts of the universe” is important, but it’s not everything.

I’m going to end it here because I don’t know where to take this. That’s okay because this is just an attempt, something I can come back to later and revisit. After all, I’m not perfect.

“I’m much more a gardener than an architect,” concluded George RR Martin in an interview with the Guardian in 2011. What did he mean? He explained that there are two types of writers,

the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows.

I’m definitely a gardener, but I’ve always wished I was an architect.

In school, I always struggled with writing essays because I was usually required to write an outline first, and I hated writing outlines. I didn’t know what I wanted to say; how am I supposed to write an outline for an argument I don’t have yet? I needed to write to know what I thought—to drop the seed in the hole and water it and see what grew from it. But I never allowed myself to explore this side of writing because I had deadlines to meet, and because I was an immature student, I always left all my assignments until the absolute last minute.

In this, I haven’t changed much.

It’s almost 8pm as I’m writing this. I mostly had an idea of what I wanted to write, but instead of spending time throughout the day writing, I procrastinated and only started writing a few hours before I usually go to bed. Sure, deadlines are one of the great motivators in life, but I’m not a young and naive teenager anymore—I don’t have the strength or the time to procrastinate. Nor do I want to anymore.

All my novels have languished for two reasons: I could never meet my own deadlines, and I spent too much time watering the soil instead of figuring out how many rooms the house is going to have. You don’t want to know how many times I’ve rewritten the same story because of the new “seed” I found and I just absolutely had to see what grew from it. Even this post has grown into something I didn’t quite plan or foresee. I had this John Ruskin quote I wanted to fit into this, but I think I’ll have to save it for another day.

I want to be an architect, even a bad architect, as Warren Ellis wrote back in June. “I’m bad at plans,” he wrote. “I try, but I always end up winging it.” And here, I can find both solace and a valuable lesson: as long as I’m out in the field scoring the soil with my trowel and planting the seeds and watering them, I’ll be okay. But an unplanted seed won’t grow, and an unwritten story will never be told.

Whether I plant seeds joyfully and see what grows from them or whether I pull out my drafting pencil and straight edge and get to drafting my house, as long as I’m writing, I’ll be fine.

This may be hard to believe, but I am not perfect.

I make mistakes. Like, all the time. One of the reasons why I’m still single in my 30s is because of the many mistakes I’ve made.

After I published yesterday’s post, I went to bed feeling like something was off. Was it the clunkiness in my writing? Yes, but that wasn’t it. My writing is always clunky. Was it how rushed I felt while writing it? Yes, but I always feel like that when working under a deadline. Was it my borderline inappropriate title? Yes, but it wasn’t quite that either.

It was all the above.

Another one of my many “rules” over the years has been to never update or revise anything I’ve published, except for the odd typo or to add a word I’ve needlessly omitted. I’ve never written this “rule” in some style guide or anything, but it was something I did and followed. Once my post is published, I felt like I was done with it, and it was time to move forward.

One of my goals with this project is to refine my craft and revamp my mindset, and part of that means clarifying these unwritten “rules” I hold in my head, to challenge and question them. And this is one of those “rules” I’m challenging.

I remember reading that Robin Sloan edited his posts all the time, and that has provided some comfort. Robin writes:

I remember when I blogged on Snarkmarket, years ago, I would change my posts ALL THE TIME. Not just typo fixes but make pretty substantial tweaks—clumsy language detected with the benefit of an hour’s reflection. Like oil paint; you can move it around for a long time. I loved it.

That quote comes from a post on the great Austin Kleon’s blog, a post where he writes that “blog posts can be edited, added to, improved upon.” Why is that important? Because “I want to be able to be wrong. I want to change my mind! I want to evolve.”

I want to evolve.

To evolve is to admit you’re not perfect, that you are capable of improvement, that your journey is ongoing and never-ending. To evolve is to live, and all I want is to live, mistakes and all.

Earlier today, I re-read yesterday’s post, and I spent some time revising some of it. I changed the title, I polished some of the clunkiness, and I clarified a few thoughts. I would normally be petrified of doing this, but part of my evolution is to do the scary things and hope my readers understand.

Like Austin writes, “to do the exploration that growth and change requires, one needs a forgiving medium… but what one really needs is forgiving readers.”

I will add that I also need to forgive myself for the many mistakes I’ve made and will make. After all, a life without mistakes is a life not lived at all, and again, all I want is to live.

One of the things I don’t feel comfortable with yet is writing about topics like I’m some sort of authority on it. I don’t feel like I’m much of an authority outside of my own life. I feel confident writing about my own feelings because their mine, and I write to explore them, to understand them. I like referring to these pieces as essays in the way that Michel de Montaigne used the word, as attempts to understand my thoughts and feelings.

These essays are mostly contained in my Journal. If you’ve read them, you’ll have seen how personal I can get with them. They’re personal because I don’t know how else to write. How can you try to understand your emotions without getting personal? Since I started blogging again in 2020, I’ve included one of my photos in each essay as a supplement to my writing, and even here, these photos are also attempts, attempts to explore my photography, to discover ways to improve this craft. These “rules” I’ve set for myself have helped me focus these essays, but they have also stopped me from writing more. Each essay must have a photo, I tell myself, and if they don’t, then I won’t write them and I won’t publish them. It feels silly writing that out like this, but it’s true.

My Notes, on the other hand, were supposed to be more free. They were supposed to be my playground, a place to try new things, to amuse myself with silly notes or one-off photos. But… I don’t know. I guess I grew scared that I might offend someone or post too much to annoy my audience. I wanted to be safe, and that desire to be safe meant I restrained myself from playing around like I wanted to. As I’m writing this, I feel sad about that. Like I wrote yesterday, this is my home. My home means my rules. I have every right to amuse myself, so that’s what I’m going to try and do.

During this attempt at blogging every day in November, I’m giving myself permission to try new things and to explore different areas of my craft. I want to have fun doing this, and by having fun, I hope to discover something new about myself. Because if you’re not having fun, then what’s the point?

And by here, I mean my website. By here, I mean my RSS feed in your RSS reader app. By here, I do not mean Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or any other social media company whose purpose is to suck up your content greedily to feed their money making machine without regard to you or your well-being.

It starts here.

My words in my home under my name. I own this—I own all of it—and you should, too. Your words in your home under your name. This is what the internet is, and what the internet should always be, a place by people and for people. No algorithms telling you what you should pay attention to, no corporations shoving their half-baked ideas in your face and telling you to like it, but a place where a shy, weird, nerdy guy can write without restraint and share photos of leaves or whatever.

Recently, Manuel Matuzovic, a very well-respected web developer was banned from Twitter for reasons unknown. In a post on his blog, he describes some of the things he’s lost since his ban. He doesn’t have access to his direct messages anymore, images, or bookmarks, and he even lost access to some sites that used Twitter as the login method. One day, everything was normal and the next, all the years of content he produced on someone else’s website was locked away from him, possibly forever.

Isn’t it somewhat ridiculous that these companies exist because of the content their users produce, content millions of people produce for free, and yet these users own none of it? That they can lose all of it by the whims of someone like Elon Musk? Or Mark Zuckerberg? What kind of living hell is this?

Toward the end of his post, Manuel writes:

If there’s something I’ve learned from this whole thing, it’s that I must be more careful with how and where I share my content. A social media platform should not be the primary source. […] Create everything on my own website and syndicate elsewhere, because you never know what might happen to your content or profile tomorrow.

“Now is a good time to reclaim control over your content,” he concludes.

I agree.

And it starts here.

Have you heard of National Novel Writing Month? Apparently, there’s a National Blog Posting Month, too.

After giving it very little thought, I’m going to participate in NaNo—no, NaBloMo—wait, NaBloPoMo—there we go. At least, I’m going to try.

From Amy:

Having taken part in NaBloPoMo last year (See a summary of 2021’s effort), I found out the hard way how important it is to get ahead with ideas and drafts, rather than leaving it until the day of each post to write it.

Have I learned from my mistakes and organised myself better this year? No. But here we are.

I’ve done daily challenges before, and I’ve enjoyed them well enough, so why not challenge myself with something new? I’ve been collecting dozens upon dozens of ideas and half-written blog posts over the past year or so, and I’m tired of them collecting dust. I want to explore them and work on them and draft them and publish them and see what happens.

I’m hesitant because oh my god who has time for this? But that’s the thing, isn’t it? We choose what we pay attention to, and by making this choice or that choice, we are choosing how we want to live our lives. I choose to write. That’s how I want to live my life.

So, let’s write.

For a full month.

What could go wrong?

I guess we’ll have something nice to look at while the world burns around us:

Climate change will increase opportunities to see rainbows, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Hawai’i (UH) at Mānoa. The study’s authors estimate that by 2100, the average land location on Earth will experience about 5% more days with rainbows than at the beginning of the 21st century.

That’s about 18 more days than normal, which I guess is something. Silver lining and all, considering.

To celebrate their 40th Anniversary, Library of America has reduced the prices for 40 of their boxed sets by 40% or more. I shouldn’t have, but I bought the complete novels by Kurt Vonnegut. Who doesn’t love Kurt Vonnegut?

My wallet, probably.