You know what really sucks about having a self imposed daily blogging rule? It’s those bad days where there’s nothing going on worth writing about, or you’re not far enough along in a project to say anything interesting or compelling about it. I’ve spent the last two and a half hours just pacing around the house thinking. Thinking about what to post on the blog today. That’s two hours I could have spent chipping away at Atoning Mirror or Fleeing Victory, or even fiddling with the Zavodia map. That’s the kind of time spent that made me question my rule the first time around. I wound up dropping that rule, partially because I spent so much time fretting about the blog that I had even less time to work on anything else. The posts I came up with were almost always disproportionately small compared to the time it took to come up with them. It really did suck back then, and today is no different.

Even so, I’m not quitting this time. The last time I threw out that daily blogging rule, the blog reached a point where there was no activity, no updates, for a month or longer. The funny part? I wasn’t getting any more done during those off days than I was when I was adhering to the rule. The truth is, there are just things you have to do in life, and you want to make sure as many of those obligations are serving your goals as possible. If you don’t, if you let something crucial to your goals, but optional to your life as a whole fall by the wayside, the rest of the obligations (and a few dumb asides) will quickly fill in the vacuum. That’s exactly what happened when I gave up that rule. My pace didn’t improve, I just got busier with other things. Every second of every hour in your day is going to be taken up by something, and even if all you did was knit or something, that activity would find a way to eat up almost all of your time eventually. That’s just the way humans work. These days it’s more TV and youtube than productive things like knitting, though.

With that, I decided to post about the only thing I could think of. I’m posting about how absolutely frustrating it is to not have anything to post about. It’s not the first time I’ve pulled this card, but I think my thoughts on the matter are a bit clearer today. That daily posting rule isn’t just a good idea, it’s a crucial one. It’s the primary bulwark holding back the outside pressure to do other things. I may have spent those two and a half hours chucking half-baked ideas out a window, but that’s just because I’m still somewhat new to all of this. The longer I keep setting aside that extra time to keep the Praedian Records up to date, the better I’m going to get at using that time. Eventually I’ll be able to post about anything at any time without nearly so much thought going into it, and the daily posting rule is the only thing that ensures I’ll ever actually reach that point.

I never feel like I have quite enough time to do these, and I often don’t. They still get done, though. Even if they’re just quips or one-liners, they get done. That’s also how humans work, I guess: That sense of urgency. I’m always running out of time before I owe my blog two posts instead of just one … and you better believe that if I ever worked my way up to owing three or wound up in a brief coma again, I’d make up the difference as soon as I possibly could. That’s the rule, and that’s why I’m sticking with it, even on days like this, where all I can do is rant into the aether. So be it. It’s for the Good.