blogathon

Some of you may be wondering why I’ve suddenly been blogging so frequently. I’m part of a blogathon — sponsored by fellow writer (and fellow Portlander) Michelle Rafter. All participants are posting new blog entries every day for the entire month of May.

(Of course, I didn’t find out about it until 7 May, so I’m about a week behind everyone else.)

I’d initially started this blog with the idea of posting once each week. For the first week or so, that was a piece of cake. I was actually having to hold myself back from posting daily. That was in autumn 2004. After a short while, I found my entries were less frequent, and my blogging motivation was waning. I wasn’t sure what to write about, and what to keep to myself. Plus, I was convinced no one was reading this thing anyway.

More time went by, and I was sometimes lucky to post one new entry per month.

This year, I’d been getting better about returning to the once weekly blog schedule, but it was still way too easy to slip. That’s why I joined in on Michelle’s challenge. Post at least once a day. About anything. Even if all I’m throwing up here is the ingredients list from my dog’s breakfast. (Interesting to note that “dog’s breakfast” has also been used to euphemistically refer to the human brain.)

The logic is similar to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), in which I’ve participated annually since 2004. Write 2,000 words a day, every day, for the month of November. By the end of the month, you’ve got a first draft of a new novel. It’s hard work, but it’s wicked fun.

I figured that writing once a day, about anything, would be a good exercise — not only in revitalizing my blog (assuming I’ve not frightened anyone away with my strange range of subject matter of late), but in spurring on other creative juices, too. And I have to say it’s going rather well. I started out the process by typing up a tentative list of topics I thought I might cover during the month, yet I’ve scarcely had to refer to it. Enough comes up each day that I generally still have to pick and choose what to write about. No dearth of material here.

Save for this evening, perhaps. This is my Saturday post, which will actually be going online in the wee hours of Sunday morning. I’d not factored in a cook-out with my boyfriend’s pals, followed by back-to-back hockey games. My apologies.

I’m not sure that I’ll keep up this same pace after 1 June, but I won’t have any doubt that I’d be able to continue blogging daily, if I wanted to. This is also a good indication that I have plenty of material for regular podcasts, too — it’s just a matter of working podcast writing and production time into my schedule. Sometimes, once you’ve decided to just dive into the middle of a challenge, it’s not nearly as difficult as you’d anticipated.