I lied. It doesn’t sound easy at all. I mean, I do it all day long already over at the ol’ ball and chain day job, but blog every day on my personal bloggy experiment? Impossible! Impossible, I say! But that’s the key, it would seem. Or at least that’s one of the habits working for my favorite ‘terriblemind’ – all-around self-proclaimed penmonkey Chuck Wendig.

Last week Chuck wrote a post called “The Official Terribleminds Writer’s Guide to Blogging About Blogging”, an activity that is taboo and looked down upon in some writing circles, and very much the norm for every other writer and their mom in others. But Chuck takes a different turn than most writers who tell other writers not to dare dare dare writing about writing, especially if you’re more of a self-proclaimed writer looking to be a self-realized writer – then writing about writing is even more not what you should be doing. According to some. Chuck disagrees. His attitude is, well, exactly the way I feel every time I read a blog post by some (writer) important high-up there so you should listen to them industry person who says I shouldn’t even attempt to blog about writing – I immediately want to tell my computer monitor to fuck that!

But even though I want to write about writing, as well as anything else that’s on my mind because that’s the role these self-expressing blogs play – allowing you and avenue to tap into and explore your narcissism on a level even you couldn’t anticipate (and this is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just the way of our media and technolgy-saturated world), reading these foreboding messages from some higher writer power plants a tiny little microscopic cell of self-doubt. And then those cells start to divide and replicate, and woop before I know it I have a tiny little colony of unknown writer self-doubt fungal-izing all over my hands. And believe me, you can’t type with a bad case of unknown writer self-doubting fungalitis. No way.

But that’s where Chuck’s post restored the little writer kid in me who’s still buried down there somewhere. His two (yes, only two) rules for blogging about blogging (which, lets face it, most blogging writers will end up doing every now and then whether they mean to or not) were as follows: “Blog about whatever the fuck you’d like!” Finally some rules after my own heart. Oh, the second rule: “Don’t be a Dick” – always good advice. But the part that jumped out at me like headlights of a semi-truck speeding the wrong way down a highway straight for me was this bit about blogging: do it ‘every damn day, seven days a week.’ Now Chuck didn’t actually set this down in stone, but it sure helped him grow his blog’s readership from 900-something views in a month, to 18,500 visits in just one day two years later. Not bad Cap-i-tan! Not bad!

I’m not saying Chuck’s figured out the recipe for a successful blog, much less as successful blogging-to-writing full time attempt for the newbie writer, but he sure does seem to get to the heart of why most bloggers – or at least why I – even got myself into this crazy newfangled blogging thing in the first place: to satisfy some incessant need inside me to write regularly, and put it out there for the world to experience without the complete commitment or red-pen review of the entire publishing world. Blogging for the wanting writer is, essentially, a way to practice publishing your own work without actually publishing your own work (through a publisher or your own hard-worked elbow grease). It’s a way for you to dip a tow into the pools of public criticism, developing audience building and marketing skills if you’re really savvy with it, and perform some much needed regular maintenance on those rusty old writer gears, all in relative anonymity (if that’s what you’re going for).

This is not the case for everyone, but this is definitely what I aim to get out of it, at least for now. And the biggest problem in my daily routine? The fact that I write all day long for work, and have fallen into a schedule where I lapse and often don’t commit myself to buckle down to some dedicated writing time every day, and even when I do, I put it toward journaling rather than blogging or working on any ongoing pieces. I would like to be submitting a few pieces for publication every month, and am not at all doing that right now, and if I want to ween myself off of these bad habits, I’m going to have to expand my daily writing ritual. Chuck’s got me there. Can’t be a writer if you don’t write much (at least about what you want to be writing about, and not what someone might be paying you to write about, though that has it’s place too).

Ideally this is how my daily writing ritual would go, after all necessary freelance work is done, of course, which could only happen in a utopian society where I have mastered the art of completely efficient time management and self-motivation, so it’s safe to call this one a pipe dream… Anyways, this is how it would go:

1. Early morning (post- coffee, yoga and a leisurely reading of the morning headlines): Complete morning pages at 750words.com (I have been doing those good old Julia Cameron morning pages, or trying to anyways, off and on a couple of years now, but on the New Year I took the pledge seriously and switched over to 750words because the easy, clean interface is motivating for me, plus the writing stats are fun and slightly addicting). [Side note: If you haven't checked out Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way", or any of her other books, it's definitely worth looking into. As far writing inspiration, how to, and help me I need to find away to get out of my own writing funk before I lose it books, this one is a total classic.]
2. Mid-morning (pre-lunch hopefully, depending on No. 1): Blog post! Write (complete and publish) a blog post. Any old blog post. I say I want to do this early because there’s the strong likelihood I will find justifications for pushing it back if I allow myself, so I should really try to keep to a rigid schedule when I can so I don’t forget to write as the day progresses and wake up with a terrible start sometime between 2 and 4 a.m. in the middle of a terrifying nightmare where my computer has sprung sprinter legs and gigantic chomping teeth and is chasing me through my apartment snapping its jaws and turning all of my books into confetti as it goes.
3. Afternoon/evening/middle of the fucking night because I can’t sleep due to being too ramped up about my awesome idea that I thought of during No. 1, No. 2, or any other stroke of genius had throughout the day: Spend 1-3 hours working on an ongoing project. These could be that screenplay idea I thought up for ScriptFrenzy last year and then never even attempted to do anything with, or that spec sitting half done on my hard drive, or (eeep) a whole novel with a narrative arc and everything, or even a goddam poem – though if I’m being truthful, I’ve never been a great poet… I want to be, but it’s just not my natural jam in the pb&j, but who cares because this time is time to work on that kind of stuff. The shit that piles up and piles up and stays in its tiny idea pod, never to be cracked open or turned into anything… until now.

If I could do all that (ha! EVERY writer wants to do all that)… But let’s just say I could, for arguments sake, I would be the happiest little writer you ever did see. I’d still wear my pajamas to work and realize, only horribly after the fact, that I’ve been dressed in the same juice-stained t-shirt for three days (and nights). But I’d be happy as hell! And the only way I’m ever going to get every writer’s big old dream of a daily writing routine, is if I just start doing it. If I keep on doing boring old regular work and justifying that I don’t have any time for personal writing, I never will. But if I put the time into my day tomorrow, and then beat myself over the head for 30-days or so as I try to develop the godforsaken habit of putting myself first, and set alarms and leave post-its around my apartment incredulously quizzing me on whether I’ve done any REAL (non-work, personal, for fun, out of the blue) writing today – it’s harder to lie to yourself than you’d think! – and struggle through the habit-forming process, one day *poof* I’ll have a fully developed daily writing routine up and running. Just like that! *Poof!*

At least that’s the plan. Other people tell me not to be so hard on myself, but I know me, and secretly when you don’t all know it and you think I have a headache, or am sick the pneumonia, or have to work late, or aren’t feeling well, or have an errand to run, or am dealing with a sudden and catastrophic car problem, really I am feeling antisocial and lazy, am instead eating ice cream in my pjs watching “Say Yes to the Dress” with my cat, put off my work all day and that’s why I have to work late, am on a major Buffy the Vampire Slayer or anything Joss Whedon bender and can’t be bothered to socialize with real people, or am just plain lying because I’m bored and tired and jaded and all that blah, blah, blah. Except for that one time that I actually did change a car tire on the side of a highway in the middle of nowhere while it hailed all over the place in 30 minutes flat. That was awesome, but it was during a road trip so it doesn’t count. Oh, and that one time I actually did have pneumonia.

What I’m saying is, I know me, and tough self-love is the way to go. So to take a feather out of the hat of Mr. Chuck Wendig, here goes my attempt to write. Daily. It won’t always be pretty (but hey, it’s not supposed to be!), and it won’t always be in the mid-morning time frame I so dream about, but it will be as regular throughout the day as I can manage. At times I might ask you to be lenient with those time zones, just between us (thanks! *wink*). And if I miss a day, I’ll try not to kick myself harder than I usually do (but secretly will, self-punishment is my curse). Here goes!