Wednesday, January 25, 2017

It's a blog's life



Look, I’m not asking for sympathy, but it’s hard to be a daily blogger.

Today, I taught four classes and then hit the road to drive six hundred miles to a reading. I’m bushed, I’m in a hotel room, it’s nearly midnight—but I’ve committed to write three blog posts each day.

I read and review a book of poetry every day, and that’s something I prepared for before leaving. I also write a post about an issue related to writing or creativity (I think of this as the real substance of my blog). And I’ve also taken to posting erasures of presidential statements from each day.

I had to skip dinner, and half of a Slim Jim sits in my stomach like a fat man stuck in a bathtub. My eyes are closing, and I have to be up in four hours.

It’s cool. It’s coming together, and I’ll keep this one short. But sometimes in our writing we make commitments—to ourselves, to some idea of an audience, to our muse/genial spirit/God. And when we don’t meet those commitments, it can set us back a little. Writing lulls begin, after all, with a missed commitment to the self.

We put ourselves into this kind of pickle because we wanted to do something strenuous or ambitious—to push ourselves as far as we can.

And tonight I can be pushed as far as a brief handful of blog posts and then bed.


But I kept my commitment. It’s not even midnight yet.

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