A Post A Day for 30 days

I've been randomly thinking of what to write in this blog for a couple of weeks. I've been thinking about writing a blog for even longer. Thoughts and ideas fly by in the morning. In the car. While talking over a beer with friends and coworkers. As I'm reading book or an article that spurs further thought threads that carry my mind on the breeze like a trail of web from a spider as it leaps off a high point in search of new territory.

But the blank page stares. It mumbles. It lays fallow. It's subtly daunting in its emptiness. If I'm going to write a blog, it needs to be good. Witty. (Ha!) Insightful. (Depends.) Opinionated. (Perhaps.)

But mostly, it won't write itself. Not at first anyway. With my vBlogs, almost nothing is staged. It's principally captured at-the-moment. The camera just has to be within reach.

With the written word, you can pause, think (or not), rewrite.

And the blank page stares.

What am I going to write about? It's not that there's not enough. It's that there's too much. Much to much. So, I'd simply best get started.

But where?

So it hit me.

I hated to write in high school. I paid a friend to write some of my papers for me (irony was that her mom was a teacher and thus ended up grading her daughter's work...but with my name on it). Bad on me for that, yes of course. But I HATED to write. The blank page always taunted me.

It taunted me not so much in its emptiness, but in its sheer volume. It contained not nothing. It contained everything. And when you're faced with everything staring at you, finding a place to start can be difficult.

In Freshman English in my first semester in college I had an instructor that cured it for me. With an assignment. It didn't feel like a cure at the time -- in fact when the assignment was first delivered it felt nothing other than oppressive -- but the light came on over the coming days and weeks.

The assignment was to write a journal. Not necessarily a personal journal of thoughts and ideas, but simply a full sized notebook in which we were required to write a page a day. Of anything. Anything at all. The only rule was that we had to fill a page. Every day.

And so I learned to address the BLANK PAGE every day that semester. I was amazed that it only took this writing-hating guy a matter of a few weeks to reduce the all-caps BLANK PAGE to lowercase 'blank page' and eventually to simply 'the day's starting point.'

To my Freshman English instructor that first semester: I don't recall your name, but you did a great thing for me. It was appreciated. You forced me to break my bad attitude about the blank page. Thank you.

Yet over the years, it has returned. Admittedly, bad attitudes about a lot of things come naturally to me. But this one does not serve my purpose. And thus it must be vanquished once more.

And so it is with that in mind that this rusty writer in me has decided to address the beginning of a blog. I will write a post every day. The intent is to do it no matter what. Unlike the first semester in college assignment I had, I am not requiring myself to fill a minimum of a 'whole page' but merely to make a post of any length.

Every day.

Regardless of whether I feel like saying anything or not.

And therein lays the caution: Also regardless of whether it will be worth reading or not.

Cheers,

Greg