Blogging to Beat the Band

I started this blog back on Sept. 21, largely to see how long or if I could sustain sitting down each to write something. I've never been a journal keeper or diarist. The many times I have tried to do so have fallen by the wayside at some point. The beauty of blogging, I suppose, is that the requirements are minimal. You just sit down at the computer (something I do everyday) and write something. It doesn't have to Shakespeare or Joyce or any of those other dead white guys that I studied in college. It just has to be writing. It doesn't have to lead anywhere, that is, to a poem or a short story or a novel. It just has to be. It is, in the terminology of the web, "raw," and "unfiltered." I rarely go back to edit or rewrite unless I later realize I wrote something that was factually wrong or misspelled a name etc. But just sitting down and writing is generally the solution offered anyone facing writer's block: just sit down and write something, anything, and don't worry about whether it's "perfect" or not. This is, of course, hard for me to do. I have a strong perfectionist streak when it comes to writing. I have been an editor most of my life and am my own worst enemy when it comes to my own writing. I often edit what I have written into oblivion. Delete this, delete that, pretty soon you wind up with nothing. I know that there are bloggers out there who are looking for fame and fortune through their blogs. I recently saw a TV news report about a college course on how to become famous as a blogger: it's all about getting as many "friends" as you can through social networking and turning your "friends" into your blog readers etc. The student who had done well the particular week the news report was done had enhanced his blog readership by doing audacious stunts on YouTube: one was riding a bicycle through New York, wearing only a thong. Another had something to do with some sort of street prank he pulled on people (and had someone document) and put up on YouTube. Anyone, that's not what my blog is about. It's very personal with a very narrowly defined purpose: getting myself to write each day. So far, it's been successful. I have blogged now for 41 days in a row, including days on the road where internet connections are not always a given. If this experiment works as I hope, at some point I will migrant off the blog and onto projects that I have been working on for years but never finished. So I guess that in my case, when the blog goes away, it will mean I will have been successful. But until then, I'm not getting on a bicycle wearing only a thong.