Blogging challenges

I set myself a goal of posting to this blog once a week. For the most part, it’s worked out well. I keep a journal of post ideas, and I typically select one on Monday, start writing, and try to post it at some point on Wednesday.

One rationale for keeping this schedule is that the discipline is good for me—I’m in the middle of a job search and career pivot, and the landscape is uncertain, especially in my chosen fields of technology, coding, and education. Having a regular activity helps keep me grounded.

This week, the process broke down.

Technique

I’m a perfectionist, so, given the opportunity, I live in the re-read, edit, and restructure cycle indefinitely. The once-a-week format requires me to constrain myself: I generally write out a post from start to finish, sometimes relying on a rough outline, apply some light edits, throw it at an LLM to catch grammatical mistakes, and then put it online.

This has served me well. I know that an important part of art is the act of creating, and it’s easy to get in my own way by insisting holding everything I create to too high a standard. I still struggle with being okay with posting what I consider to be substandard writing—awkward language, sloppy logic, unconsidered viewpoints.

This week’s struggle

I had a great idea for this week’s post, and I began writing yesterday. As I wrote, I discovered a few flaws in my ideas. I wrote more as I explored them, and rather than finding resolutions, I just deepened the fissures and found more.

I got to a point this morning where I had to stop. My points above notwithstanding, I worry that the flaws are too severe to consider publishing it. The whole thing feels like it’s falling apart, and I don’t know what, if anything, is salvageable.

Ugh.

Forging ahead

Hence this piece. I can’t waste too much more time on writing this week, and my stricken post has already sapped too much momentum. So, here I am, writing about my writing process, keeping my commitment.

It’s not what I’d envisioned for the week. But it’s something, it’s real, it’s exercise, and that makes it a piece of art—flawed or not.