I don’t have many self-imposed rules for Blaugust, but to help it from being a total freeform, chaotic mess that I wind up getting lost in and frustrated by, I figured a few proverbial lights along the path would help keep me moving forward.
In no particular order:
- I will post at least one blog entry every day. I don’t know that it’ll ever be more than that, but I want one to be the minimum, because part of the idea of Blaugust is to demonstrate to bloggers that they can (nay, should) post more content more often. So it seems in keeping with the spirit of the event that I actively do that on the regular. That’ll also help perhaps establish something of a habit, though I’m not kidding myself into thinking I’ll just be posting every day come September.
In the unlikely event that I’m out of wifi and data range for a day or more, I’ll look into pre-posting material — I think that’s a thing I can do with these settings I’ve never tried — so it at least appears on my site once a day. But ideally I’d be manually doing the task myself at least once a day. - I can write as often as I want to. Meaning, I won’t try to contain myself to only one post or topic per day. If I have the time and energy and inspiration to write about a different topic that I’ll post a different day, so be it. I’ve posted plenty of content over the years that has taken me more than one sitting and writing session to finally pin down, and that works for me.
- … but I’ll limit myself to a specific amount of daily time to write. Listen, I’d love to not have this need to be a thing at all. But the fact is that if I don’t put some time limit on it, I’ll just noodle on ideas on and off all day, amid surfing the web and reading and playing games and watching TV and anything else that strikes my fancy (assuming I can ever financially afford it, I’m going to absolutely slam-dunk retirement). And as it is, I suspect whatever time I carve out for myself daily will already lead to some inconveniences for the family. As a non-daily writer, and now for years with a work schedule that’s all over the map from day to day, I’ve never established a hard line with the family informing them that from X to Y o’clock every day, it’s got to be my undisturbed writing time. So I’m not just going to take this month to just indulge in as much writing as I want to do day to day. Unfair and impractical.
Now, how much time that will be still has to be determined. I haven’t done daily blog posting before, so I’m reluctant to assign a specific time allotment to the task with any hope of it being right without field testing it. This will probably need to be figured out in real time over the first few days or week or so, to get a better feel for how much I can satisfactorily do within what amount of time, particularly given I’ll know that that’s all the time I’m getting per day.
And I think that’s about it.
I’ve already started writing down subject ideas, but not many. Here’s hoping the unique pressure of posting daily will help prime that pump a bit. It’s a truism that quantity of work you produce leads to quality, and related to that, I’ve long said that volume of work begets creativity.
This is time to shut up the inner critic and forge ahead, reminding myself to trust the process that I know works when I put in the time and effort.