One of the greatest challenges of blogging is coming up with new material. Some people might assume this comes easily to me, since I’m a college English instructor. After all, I teach writing. I write all the time. It should be, you know, like, totally easy!
But they would be wrong. Coming up with worthwhile material is hard, even for excellent writers. Coming up with junk is easy (see: Facebook status updates).
It’s nearly lunchtime on a hot Friday morning, and dammit, I was hoping to have achieved a lot more by 11:56am. Alas, no. I’m just now getting to this blog post, having spent the rest of the morning editing photos for future editions of Nearly Wordless Wednesday and Friday Photo. Adobe should have called their (in)famous photo editing software Photowork, because there is no shop. Shop → shopping → fun. Using Photoshop ≠ fun, at least for the minor tinkering I’m doing right now.
Where was I? Right—I’ve spent the entire morning prepping images for future posts. It’s a pain, adding copyright info to the images and file properties, but worth it. And like many blog authoring platforms, WordPress allows me to schedule posts ahead of time. Great! I’ve taken care of six or eight posts for the month of June. But these posts generally don’t include much copy. What do I do for the other 22 days of the month?
I’ve followed other “a post a day” challenges on other blogs, such as Eden Kennedy’s hilarious website. Usually, the authors are exhausted at the end of the 30-day period. Often, though, I’ve been able to track how their writing improves over those 30+ posts. Daily posts force them to consider what’s worth posting and what’s not. And when they post something crappy, everyone knows right away that it probably could’ve used another few hours of thought.
Okay. I’ll take up the “a post a day” challenge. I’m working on half a dozen different posts that require thought and careful revision, so that’s at least a little something. Years ago, I blogged regularly under a pseudonym, and it was great practice and fun to see what I could come up with next for my couple dozen readers. But I never tried to post daily for 30 days. This site is under my real name. Everyone can see what I’m doing, and it had better be good.
Ugh. I think I’m going to be sick.
I posted twice yesterday, but chances are that a two-post day will be the exception rather than the rule. Can I do it? Can I post something worthwhile every day in June 2012? I guess we’re about to find out.
