NaBloPoMo: Day 1

So today I am starting in earnest a blog-writing exercise that will hopefully unlock my weird inability to keep up a blog consistently for more than a few days. I'm going to blog every day for the month of November. Weekdays and weekends. EVERY DAY. I promise (I hope). The dumb name is a spin-off of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, bien sur), which, though the goal is to write a novel in a month, is more about letting go of your writing hang-ups and just getting shit down on paper in order to fulfill a length requirement, then hoping your brain shat something worth reading in that amount of time.

Which leads me to my biggest problem (and my excuse for not making it past NaNoWriMo: day 2. Not because I'm totally lazy or anything): Being a compulsive editor, I can't write more than two paragraphs without reading back over them and editing the shit out of them and switching words and ripping my writing apart, and for that reason, blogging is somehow completely excruciating. Mostly I feel like Lonoff from "The Ghost Writer" who sums up his job thusly:

I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

Barring the sofa part (because I'm never not lying on the sofa), that's pretty much how I write. Every once in a while I'm lucky enough to have giant bursts of inspiration when I'm in that sweet twilight of sleep, right before drifting off at night, and even then, I only drag my ass out of bed to write the Words Of Genius down about 1% of the time. The only reason I can possibly think of why I ever managed to finish things on deadline at the DTH is because I had to. And even then it took me a really, really long time to be able to write stuff of consistent quality day after day, week after week.

And I know that's definitely a "use it or lose it" kinda thing. And I feel like I'm losing it. So I'm going to force myself to write down something every day, no matter how small or stupid. And hopefully it will all be about food. Either way, I do need to get back in the habit of writing consistently every day, since that is my career aspiration and all.

So join me, won't you? Maybe by December 1st I'll be a little better at this than I am today.

Heelarious comic via.