Throughout the last 100 days I have been trying to fuel my daily writing habit by sitting down at the start of the day and writing a page of prose. Sometimes it worked well enough and other times it produced derivative writing about writing, but that happens from time to time. In the midst of being reflective sometimes that activity allows my attention to focus on the process of writing. For the most part daily writing helped establish my habit of waking up and writing. Without question the new puppy that arrived along the way was a great alarm clock. It created a lot of opportunity to work at very early hours of the day. I’m curious if 100 days in a row was enough to help establish the writing habit. I really do believe that writing on a daily basis is a good way to think out loud. The activity itself is all about thinking and actively questioning the world. You have to be reflective and question things with a deep skepticism before any degree of appreciation.
Moving forward I’m going to try to keep this writing streak going for as long as possible. You can go back and scroll across the time stamps for the last 100 days. These weblog posts arrived on time and are mostly during the very early hours of the day. The one thing that the daily writing habit exercised in the last 100 days was a bit of creativity, but no real strong narrative jumped out. I was not writing for any one cause or to press one agenda. For better or worse the prose is almost exclusively stream of consciousness based. I simply sat down at this custom built computer and typed. My thoughts at the start were mostly just a blank slate or purely tabula rasa. Everything else filled in along the way. Sometimes they did not fill in and the thoughts did not arrive on time. Earlier in the pandemic and quarantine that is pretty much where things stood. It was shocking and uncomfortable to the point that I simply did not want to actively write. You can imagine that at the time I was not even aware enough of the situation to be disappointed in my lack of journaling, writing, or just random note taking.
After writing for 100 days my voice has come back a little bit, but I’m not delivering a clear narrative that discusses the intersection of technology and modernity in excruciating detail. In fact, I’m barely scratching the surface of that analysis and that is entirely my fault. I could sit down and write out a short outline of where that line of thought should be going and work to fill in that outline one writing session at a time. That would not really replace this warm up exercise that happens every morning where I sit down and write for a while to get warmed up for the day. This is really just exercise for the mind, a sort of outward facing meditation of being present in the thoughts at the time. This forum where these words are now posted is just a functional journal not a chronicle of my life and times. I write about the things at the forefront of my thoughts at the very moment of the journaling. It is very functional in nature and not intended to be autobiographical or an ongoing personal narrative. Maybe that is a different use case for a weblog, but it has been clearly labeled since the start and it works for me. This is simply a place to put writing on things that are not entirely destined to be part of an academic article or a large piece of prose. This is the intellectual in between space where ideas or thoughts sit from time to time before moving on to some other project.
A 100-day publishing streak continues…
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