an end and a beginning (hopefully)

For another forty minutes or so, it is still November 30, 2011, and thus the last day of NaBloPoMo and my little experiment to try to get myself blogging more and into the habit of daily writing practice. Including this post, I wrote and posted on 28 of the thirty days of November (one missed day due to technical difficulties, one due to tiredness making me totally forget about it). I only copped out with one “wordless” post, and looking back at my output, I’d say that there were only a couple egregiously craptastic examples of my stream of consciousness dribbling into nonexistence. All in all, I am pleased.

This was all about pushing myself past my usual walls: my aversion to keeping up daily habits; my tendency to choose sleep over writing; my propensity to not write unless I have a definite topic in mind on which to hold forth in essay-ish fashion; and my directly inverse inclination to seize upon a timely subject and then let time pass by with nothing written because of any combination of laziness and perfectionism and fear until I convince myself that it’s too late and thus excuse myself for not writing. I think I’ve attacked each of these over the past month—my output, my tired-to-the-point-of-hurting eyes, and my wife, with whom I have rarely gone to bed at the same time, can attest to that. Again, I am happy.

Now, of course, is the hard part. So I met this little artificial challenge, so what? Am I gonna keep writing daily, now that I have no self-imposed time-limited obligation over my head? It’s far too easy for me to say yes, and it’s far too easy for me to do the opposite. I know, because it’s happened before. So let’s just say this. I will try to write as often as I can, more than I did before. I will try to write even when I don’t know what I’m going to write about when I sit down at the keyboard. I will try to write even when part of me says that I need to “think about it more” or that it’s too late, the topic’s past or the moment’s gone.

Scratch the “try.”

I will write.

And if I don’t—if this blog goes on hiatus for unseemly amounts of time for no good reason—the handful of you reading this, you call me on it. Don’t say, “How’s that writing thing going?” or “Are you still blogging?” Say, “Hey, lazyass, you said you were gonna write, so write!”

I might not appreciate it when you say it (and notice I’m going with the worst-case scenario of “when,” not “if”), but I’ll need it. And thank you, in advance.