consistency

Well, I missed a few days. But what's a few days when you've blogged 21 days in a row? I realize now that this exercise is not as much about blogging every single day as it is about remembering the need to write consistently. I've started to think like a writer again. I've started looking for stories in my day again. It's been a while since I wrote this consistently. It's been a while since I remembered how daunting and gratifying it is to write. Even if it's terrible output. It's about writing every single day.

There's a great blog entry here about this very thing - from the woman who dreamed up NaBloPoMo:

Alice recently pointed me toward the book Art and Fear, which I bought but haven't read yet, so I'm going to paraphrase a section Alice told me about where the authors talked about a pottery class, I believe, that broke into two groups: one group would produce a piece every day, and the other group would produce a piece when they felt inspired to. At the end of the experiment it turned out that the group who had to turn out something every day, despite having made a fair amount of crap, also produced more good work than the group who only produced when they felt ready to. The point being that when you have to do something whether you feel like it or not, you may be more open to taking more risks and to easing your perfectionist tendencies, allowing more happy accidents to crop up.

Also, a thanksgiving update: In short, it was lovely and most of the to-do list was completed just in time. In full, details tomorrow.