Posting, Pain, and Procrastination
As much as I like the motivation that group posting events like National Blog Posting Month, aka NaBloPoMo, provide, I also detest failure. I have had enough failure in my life already. Because I am a stubborn, I tend to hang on longer than I should. The concept of cutting my losses is not one that comes easily to me. But posting every single day, including weekends, can become a bit of a chore, especially when many of my posts require significant amounts of research. I didn’t navigate through October’s NaBloPoMo very well. Last Friday I was just “plain tired” as my midwestern family might have said. This is to be distinguished from “bone tired” or “dead tired.” (There are differences in degree of “severity.”) No one thing was causing the tiredness, but I just could not find any motivation for anything. I didn’t write a blog entry. I just wanted to sleep. The complex reason I am so tired? Just look to the featured image to find out why I my sleep cycle is too short and disrupted. Isn’t he adorable? I don’t know why, now that I am really an empty nester, I would bring an infant into my house. But I did, even though he is an infant puppy. Have I mentioned he put on 15 lbs., 60% of the weight he was when we got him, since we brought him into our home?
Saturday I was so out of sorts, that I let a totally unpolished piece of writing auto-publish. I worked on writing a bit throughout the weekend, but by Saturday, knew I was getting a multi-day headache. I have had this type of headache recur for 15 years or so. Sigh. I recognize them at the first twinge, blink. They used to get to migraine level with noise and light intolerance. So I would just said, “Screw it.” I don’t do well with pain.
Some people are heroic and work through headaches like these, but after so many years of losing up to one half of every, single month to blinding headaches, I feel fairly fortunate now to now experience them only occasionally and to a lesser degree than I used to. Surgery for a deviated septum helped immensely! Turns out that breathing and the oxygen it brings into the system is really important. Who knew? So now, I just putter through them, take it easy, and go with the flow. I know they will end. And I now know I will survive, know how to take the edge off the pain, and how to not rebound. So I just caught up on laundry, almost, played computer games, with the screen brightness turned way down, avoided sunlight and gave in to my lethargic, vampire tendencies. And I didn’t successfully post everyday in October.
So, I blew off “success” for October. The every day posting stipulation for participation seems to be an almost sadistic requirement. Now I happen to agree with Pablo, the guy who runs the techy, biz, and blogger’s once a month Meet-Up that I attend in Tucson. He emphasizes that you have to write every day and post every day if you want to be successful, but that is a contract with yourself. If you want to write on paper, or map out some research that will produce several pieces of writing, only you can know that and you can give yourself permission to not post that day. I write every day. I don’t think I necessarily should post every day. It gets me into trouble because:
- it becomes a chore
- it facilitates posting less than polished work
- I feel terrible when I miss doing something I am “supposed” to do
So what do I do about readers who come to my site expecting new content? Well for all three of you, you will have it, Monday through Friday, as a rule, usually, but definitely almost always. I won’t be posting much on weekends.
I’m going to give myself a vacation for a week in the near future, too. During that time I will repost some of my favorite blog posts from long ago. Yes, the timeless ones.
I’d close and post this, but first… I wonder… are there people who post there links to posts on NaBloPoMo regularly, i.e. sign up every month, but do not post every day? Would you? Have you? Should I? What do you think about posting frequency?
There will be more on this topic soon.
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