The problem of blogging

It should be easy for a writer to manage to blog regularly. And, I am a disciplined writer, at least in the sense of getting my butt in the chair and writing, nearly every day. The days I don't write, I'm editing.

Even when traveling, I write. Sometimes only in my head, but that counts as a draft too, as I recall what I wrote and do get it down, even if I find the remembered text needs work.

But blogging is something else. It's not creating a story in the sense that writing fiction is. It isn't (and shouldn't be) simply announcements about things I want to sell you. It's about sharing thoughts or experiences.

The problem is that often those thoughts and experiences are the grist for the fiction mill. Spilling them out in a blog reduces the storehouse. That's why so many writers write about writing in their blogs. It isn't that they don't want to share other things, but that they prefer to share them in another format.

Sure you can reuse experiences, but they don't taste the same the second time. Some of the flavor goes out of them. So, to blog, I look (and wait) for things that don't suit stories and sometimes it's hard to tell what does and doesn't.

Losing time

I read other people's blogs, especially those that help me understand more about publishing. And I blog to share thoughts and observations and, with luck, sell a few books and songs to those who enjoy what I write. Yet blogging often seems the wrong thing for a writer to be doing. Thinking up a topic (or even stumbling over one) and then taking the time to write it is time taken away from working on writing or music projects. If I write about things unrelated to the project I am working on, it increases the multitasking workload, which is a problem for a person who seriously does not believe that people actually multitask (they do, however perform threaded tasks). If I write about what I am writing about then I am putting work here instead of there, if you see what I mean.

It's a problem of time. We each have twenty-four hours in a day and I often wonder where mine went. I lose chunks of that time. I understand the chunks that go to what Dagny and I call domestic stuff, a broad category that we use to refer to almost anything that isn't either making art or simply having some fun. Shopping, cleaning, doing paperwork, even checking email all fits in there.

Mostly it is the art time that I can't find. If I sit down to write at nine and get a few pages rolling under my fingers, then I will look up and see that it is lunch time. And I was just getting started. The afternoon disappears the same way.

My life must contain some automatically activated time-compression plug-in. I want it out! Now!
   

This artwork has nothing whatsoever to do with this blog except that I put it here.