Despite my ambitions, I am a very inconsistent blogger. While I write something nearly every day in my journal, I have fallen out of the habit of publishing my writing for the world to see. Even my posting on social media has tapered off — well, original posts, anyway. I’m pretty heavy on the reply or comment buttons.

I can’t put a finger on exactly why my zeal for publishing has waned, but the fact that it has really bums me out. And that’s why I am taking a page off of one of my favorite writer’s blog. Shawn Blanc posted this today:

Here in the United States, November is known for three things:

Thanksgiving

Not shaving

Writing a novel

Starting today — Friday, November 1 — I’ll be writing and publishing something every day for the whole month of November.

Though, instead of writing a novel in a month, I will be simply be focused on publishing something — anything — every single day. From photos, links to interesting things, articles, reviews, etc.

And apparently this is a thing.

And Shawn’s post reminded me of a post Daniel Jalkut wrote all the way back in May, titled “Blog a Little”. And that provided a little bit of clarity on the old publishing slump here at Full City Press.

I think people neglect to write blog posts because the feedback loop is not as tangible as the onslaught of (sometimes mechanical) likes or faves that you can receive on a social network. With blogging, you need a little faith that you will gain an audience. And on the open web, you never know who might come along and expand your audience.

I can say with 100% certainty that looking at Squarespace’s analytics is one of the things that can dishearten me the fastest when it comes to publishing on the web. My head tells me I shouldn’t care about the numbers, but it’s hard not to. My head also tells me the only way to possibly change that is to show up more often, even though it’s often hard.

So, in the spirit of changing that, I’m going to blog a little. So days may just be something pretty random, other days I may drop a bunch of words. And in the spirit of Shawn’s effort, I’m going to try to show up every day this month. I even set a recurring task in Things.

See you tomorrow.