One hundred blog posts

Maybe I should be done

At the start of Inkhaven, I didn’t really want to have a blog. I hate the modern internet, and I didn’t want to add more volume to the relentless cacophony.

But blogging was the condition for doing Inkhaven, which I wanted to do because I was horribly lonely. So I made a Substack.

Nine months later, here we are with 100 posts and 100 subscribers.¹

Feelings

How do I feel about this blog, and all 100 posts therein?

Well, I’m glad for the emotional processing I’ve done via my writing; it has been deeply and materially life-changing. But I think it’s a bit weird that I did it in public like this. But maybe I had to do it in public to do it at all.

It’s also made it easier to become close with people, because people know a lot of things about my psyche (both my personal experiences and my opinions on many topics) without me having to tell them, so we can just jump right into the deep stuff. I really like that. Blogging is a surprisingly good way to communicate with friends.

So overall I don’t know. Mixed feelings on the ‘emotional processing in public’ part.

Writing

Has blogging this much made me a better writer? Probably. I was already good at writing, but my sister says I’ve found my voice, which seems kind of true. And it’s definitely made me faster at finishing, if not at the writing itself.

If it weren’t for this blog, I wouldn’t be working on a book. I probably wouldn’t have just written 31 songs in 31 days. So those are both good.

Blog-post-shaped thoughts

Inkhaven forced me to start seeing every thought as a potential blog post. By the end, all I had were blog-post-shaped thoughts, and I just couldn’t stop writing and publishing posts. Blog posts were simply what happened in my life, like water flowing downhill.

I’ve hardly posted for the past month because every thought I’m feeling I’ve had has been massaged into song form. I’ve been trying to have song-shaped thoughts and the crowd out the blog-post-shaped ones. I did not previously know nor expect that the type of writing I did would so strongly influence the way I thought. Good to know.

Writing quickly

I guess I like a lot of the things I’ve written, for various merits they may have, but there’s no single post I’m particularly proud of. That’s probably because almost none of them took any significant effort, because I got so used to the fast turnaround – having an idea, writing, and posting all in one day.

I created this blog on November 1st, which makes it 280 days old, so I have posted more than once every three days, on average, for the past nine months. As of this post I will have a 41-week streak of posting at least weekly, and some weeks, like this one, I post just to keep it.

I think it’s valuable to be able to write and publish quickly, but after churning out a song every day the past month, I’m sick of going fast. I’ve learned the skill I was going to learn from that. I want to rediscover a slower way of creating.

Why am I even blogging?

One hundred posts and I am still not entirely convinced about this blogging thing.

My blog seems like a lost purpose. It was confused right from the start – I didn’t have a strong reason I wanted to do it, but I just kept going because I got momentum.

Maybe I hold onto this blog because I care about Inkhaven, about the community. But I’ll still have those things even if I don’t force myself to post every week, even if I never post on this blog again.

And maybe I want to be doing something else with my time – working on longer-term things, investing. Editing the dozens of songs and essays I already have.

I want the time and space to think more deeply about things before I publish. I want to write a book that’s actually good – while it’s useful to have the draft I churned out in a five-day sprint, it is also a pile of words that’s nowhere near being a book.

I don’t want to force myself to just write even if I have nothing to say. I want to write for reasons other than the external push to keep blogging – because I have something to say, or because I want to experiment with some kind of writing, or just because I want to.²

So, will I post next week? Will I ever post again? I don’t know.

Probably I’ll ever post again. But maybe I need to let go of the streak.

1. I know more than half of my subscribers in person, which is just how I like it. If anything I wish it were more!

2. I did not know before I started writing this post that I was going to come to this conclusion. Writing is a useful tool for thought!