My backlog of content to revise and edit is pretty large right now. 11 drafts are sitting in the hopper for editing and refinement right now and I elected to spend the start of my Saturday morning writing. Yesterday the blogging was so joyful that it seemed like the right thing to do today. It’s not procrastination to create something wonderful instead of working on the previously scheduled items right? It might be some form of procrastination, but that is going to be accepted and we are going to move on to whatever happens to come next in the writing process. Each weekend the first block of the day is reserved for writing and working on projects before things start happening and people start making noise in the house. During those couple of hours of solitude a lot of writing happens. It’s a radical departure from the writing pattern of years ago. Twenty years ago I sat down and wrote at night before going to bed. Things have certainly changed. 

Sitting down and writing a solid page of content at the start of the day is a wonderful way to just get things going. It’s about being a solid reflective practitioner and just deeply considering things. A couple of days ago I sat down and wrote about 700 words of the best prose I have written in years. Unfortunately it was not something that could be easily published on the weblog or any of my publishing spaces. I might be able to do a little bit of editing and shift it enough to make it more shareable. It was however a wonderful reflection of my thoughts at the time. This would be an example of self censorship winning over a need for radical candor and transparency. Maybe that is a sign of being all the way grown up. We all have categories of things we could write about and it might churn out wonderful prose, but that narrative thread is just not something that could be easily shareable.  

Instead of writing research notes for the Lindahl Letter each week I could write mini state of the union type West Wing speeches that would be glowing and epic. Things could also go in a different direction and I could just elect to write at the highest level of my education. Producing content that would be generally taxing to consume that is overly technical and covering the deepest corners of a topic might be truly fun to create. It would however not be written with the reader in mind, it would simply be written for the express purpose of thinking out loud. My efforts may very well end up being bifurcated between things that are sharable and content that is rewarding to write, but entirely unwanted by readers. 

Right now the weblog itself has 2,406 posts in the private content jar. Some time ago I just changed all the content from being visible. I have been considering taking a few moments each day and revising one of those older posts and making it visible again. At some point in the not so distant past I just felt those millions of words did not need to just sit online. Yes, I did consider editing them into a manuscript and publishing it that way. Ultimately that anthology is not something that ended up getting published. It’s probably for the best. Not all weblog content is really solid storytelling with purpose. A lot of it is just content that happened before the next round of content happened.