…I have broken the record from January 2024 by writing eighteen days in a row toward the goal of blogging every day during the first month of the new year, attempting each day to string together a few hundred to a thousand words that form coherent sentences and ideas. I’ve tried to vary the shoe gazing effect by choosing to write a few days in a row in the third person, and a few more days in a row in second person. I know, I’m not fooling anyone, but it was a fun experiment. I enjoyed the vibe of that, the challenge of it, of having to pay very particular attention to my pronouns, catching myself slip up, going back to make corrections.
The purpose of the January challenge is simply to get myself writing every day and so far it is working. But the downside is that the work that I really want and need to be doing is not the blog, but the fiction. If I could work it somehow that the two were related, that one might lead to the other, that might be helpful. What’s that, you say? Michael, why don’t you write your fiction as a daily blog? I have mentioned this before, and I can’t say that I completely understand why, but I resist publishing my fiction on the blog. And conversely, I experience ZERO resistance about publishing poetry on the blog, often, or always, in its first sloppy draft form. I think it’s about performance anxiety. And about whether or not publishing fiction on the blog might negatively impact other publishing opportunities. But mostly, it’s about performance anxiety. Writing a casual essay about a bad contractor, about music I’m listening to or making, about the mundanity of daily life–that’s relatively easy to do. Writing a short poem that can be tweaked a little bit over an hour or two (or thirty minutes!), is relatively easy to do. Please don’t tell my poet friends I said that. Writing fiction, I find, is just simply more difficult, and is often, in its earliest formation, shittier than the essays or poems I feel okay about posting. I might be wrong about that. Again, performance anxiety. It’s a personal problem.
For now, I will keep doing this daily-blog-in-January thing. It’s good practice, if for no other reason than to warm myself up for the daily work I really want to be doing. But I know the other key reason to keep doing it is the fact that there a few people out there who are reading, which I appreciate immensely, more than you could possibly know. Writing is kind of a lonely activity. Writing a book takes a long time and publishing a book takes even longer, if it ever happens at all, so blogging, I find, has been a wonderful way to practice the craft and share it with other interested human beings. Brimming with gratitude in this moment. Thank you for reading, liking the posts, and commenting. Cheers! Until tomorrow!
michael jarmer 