Day Thirty

In a few minutes (or hours depending on how focused I can be) I will click the "publish post" icon at the bottom of my screen and I will save my balls from a violent collision with Scott's foot. My balls will still be subject to other dangers but they will be more safe than they were on September 1st and that counts for something. I've enjoyed this challenge. It wasn't easy and if I'd failed it would've been an extremely stupid reason to get kicked in the balls, but having been up to the task I can look back and be happy I went through this. I think there are a couple things that we've learned:

1. This was not a very good blog. This is, I think, undeniably true. My respect for those who write something interesting on a daily basis has grown immeasurably. I found it nearly impossible to pick a topic (and didn't hesitate to mention that in my posts) and when I did have a topic I found it hard to determine whether or not it was actually worth writing about.

2. I think I realized that having an exercise like this is valuable to me as a writer. Forcing myself to put something down every day has done two things. First, it's given me practice. Spending time on the activity every day has made me faster and better. Second, it's given me a sense of accomplishment. The unemployed writing lifestyle can be a little trying on one's self-esteem. "Accomplishing" something every day helps battle that.

3. I'm inherently lazy. A lot of these posts would have been significantly better had I spent a little bit of time on them. In fact, I think some of the better ones were ones that I took a lot of time to proof read (which makes sense). I got lucky on a couple by just jotting something down and throwing it online but for the most part had I taken some real time to work on these posts the blog would've been much better.

4. Getting kicked in the balls is a strong motivator. I only came close to missing a day once. That's pretty impressive considering that sometimes I forget to eat.

I'm not sure if I'll continue this process. There is something about it I like. But if I were to go on I think I'd need to do more to find a common thread for the blog. What is this blog about? What kind of things will a reader find here? As it stands, there is no real answer to those questions. And if this blog is for anyone besides me those questions need to be answered. The truth is I write much better with a goal in mind. I think I'm a bit of an independent thinker, but I'm also not really a self-starter. So finding that central theme would take a long time. I thought something like that would be uncovered in the month that I've been doing this, but it didn't really materialize. The nice thing is that as far as I know this blog has two readers so I won't worry too much about how my audience feels.

Well, that's it. 30 posts in 30 days. Not nearly as good as that dude who ate hamburgers, but it was a journey. Thanks for the challenge Scott. I look forward to hearing your song.

Also, Steve, you're running out of time. Los Feliz singles dot com. Do it.