{"id":915,"date":"2007-11-02T19:27:07","date_gmt":"2007-11-03T03:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/cheeseblog\/?p=915"},"modified":"2007-11-02T19:27:07","modified_gmt":"2007-11-03T03:27:07","slug":"because-its-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/cheeseblog\/?p=915","title":{"rendered":"Because It&#8217;s There"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I thought, on my bus-ride home today, about the all kinds of things I could write about tonight for my second day of daily blogging but then, realizing I will have little more energy than right now, before the food gets here and goes in my face, I decided I will save the thoughtful posts for the weekend and for now, at least, stick to monstrously long sentences and more easily addressed ideas.<\/p>\n<p>Annnnnnd &#8230; breath.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/motherwoman.blogspot.com\/2007\/11\/chill-filled-room.html\">Why would you nablogpomo?<\/a> asked the inimitable and perhaps moustachioed P-Man over at <a href=\"http:\/\/motherwoman.blogspot.com\/\"> Mother-Woman.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Short answer: Because it&#8217;s a hell of a lot easier than writing a novel.<\/p>\n<p>Two Novembers ago I participated in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nanowrimo.org\"> national novel writing month <\/a>and wrote a novel in a month.  Yay me, etc.  Hero biscuits abounded.  Last year, with a 4 month old kicking around the house, I knew that another novel wasn&#8217;t going to happen and besides I don&#8217;t feel right about writing another fresh novel when I have two and a half perfectly good first drafts of potential novels that need attention.  So I decided to do a blog post a day instead.  <\/p>\n<p>More why?  Because I love to write and I don&#8217;t do it enough and I have this crazy sense of responsibility, even to imaginary deadlines and people I can&#8217;t see, so if I say I&#8217;m going to post every day for a month, I am actually going to feel really guilty and bad if I don&#8217;t.  The fear of that guilt and bad-ness is enough to motivate me.  <\/p>\n<p>I was pleasantly surprised at how wonderful an exercise it was to write a blog post every day in November 2006.  There were several elements that made it wonderful:<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; lots of other people were doing it too and there was a nifty way to find their blogs and discover kindred hearts and be <i>in common<\/i> with hundreds of strangers<br \/>\n&#8211; people found me that way too and I increased my readership by at least 10%<br \/>\n&#8211; because more people were reading, I tried harder<br \/>\n&#8211; because of all the practice, my writing improved<br \/>\n&#8211; my brain felt clearer<br \/>\n&#8211; my soul was fed.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, with all that cheesy good stuff you&#8217;d think I coulda kept it up another month or 12 but like I said: I feel obliged to please other people, not myself.  If I just told myself to write every day, I wouldn&#8217;t.  It&#8217;s sick.  I know.<\/p>\n<p>So this year, the 4 month old is a 16 month old, I&#8217;m working full time and commuting 2 + hours a day and I&#8217;m 16 weeks pregnant and it&#8217;s so fetching dark out there, plus when I&#8217;m not complaining, I&#8217;m sleeping, so you&#8217;re right to wonder why. The hell. I would do this.<\/p>\n<p>Because I am a writer who prioritizes everything but writing.  And this here&#8217;s a way I can keep that bit of myself alive just one more month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I thought, on my bus-ride home today, about the all kinds of things I could write about tonight for my second day of daily blogging but then, realizing I will have little more energy than right now, before the food &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/cheeseblog\/?p=915\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloggity","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/cheeseblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/cheeseblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/cheeseblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/cheeseblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/cheeseblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/cheeseblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/cheeseblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/cheeseblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/cheeseblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}