Well, here I am at post #11 on the NaBloPoMo trail and doing just what I wanted to be doing: posting every day except Saturdays. The 'recent posts' list on the front page is now filled up with NaBloPoMo posts, which gives me a nice feeling of accomplishment. Looking back over what I've written, I think I've learned a couple of things so far:
I can write a decent-sized blog entry much more quickly than I could ever write the kind of academic stuff I used to think I wanted to write for a living, before I figured out that I hated writing it. Also, I'm actually kind of enjoying myself. That is, it's not that I hate writing per se; and that's a nice thing to realize after several years of not really writing very much unless I was absolutely forced to for work, because I'd come to associate writing with such severe mental anguish.
There's a whole slew of technical improvements I want to make to this blog. For example, you currently can't see how many comments a given entry on the front page has. This turns out to be a bit complicated to implement in the hacked-up Nanoblogger/Mason system I've put together here, which is why I haven't just gone ahead and implemented it. Another thing is comment response emails: after getting involved in several threads on friends' LiveJournal blogs, I'm realizing nobody will ever respond to my responses without getting an email. Rather, I sure as heck wouldn't, and everyone's exactly like me, right? It being my blog and all, I get to make assumptions like that! No, seriously: I'd love for there to be actual 'discussion' on my blog, and I won't be able to take my level of community involvement to that 'next level' without some kind of comment response tracking feature. So I need to set that up, which will likely involve hacking all or most of it together from scratch. Which would be lots of fun, because I'm weird and I like to do that sort of thing with my spare time—but I just haven't got the time to both do that and write a decent entry every day (and also lead my extraordinarily rich, wonderful life at the same time). On the one hand, that's a bit frustrating. On the other, it's useful to be gathering ideas for improving the place, while also having the perfect excuse not to just jump into doing them immediately: for someone who usually uses his impulsive techishness to engage in endless tinkering, and thus avoid actually posting anything, having something that just forces me to post! post! post! has been most helpful.
I'm really enjoying having written the stuff I've written so far, as a kind of general memento for my life these days. Even if I don't keep up this posting pace once NaBloPoMo ends, I'm certainly loving the 'virtual scrapbook' that it's forcing me to assemble right now, and I will look back on this time with fondness whether I stick with it beyond Nov. 30 or not.
Writing about things helps you think about them more clearly. It's something Casey, one of my music teachers at York, used to emphasize, and it's really true: spending a chunk of time daily thinking about the stuff that's going on in my life is giving me a much greater appreciation for what I've got, and is also starting to engender ideas about what directions I might like to take things in. Stay tuned...
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