Item: 1 piece of cyberspace

So, this blog has been up for a month now, and so far I’m having fun.

I’m not really a fast writer. Most of what shows up here is basically a version that I would look at the next day and immediately start cutting and rewriting. A lot of nights after I go to bed I figure out what it was I was really trying to say, or come up with a line that I really want to include. It’s all I can do to not go back and improve previous posts, but so far I’ve resisted that. The point of this is not a polished finished product, the point is consistent generation and communication of ideas.

Which brings me to my other point: time. Somehow I didn’t calculate that the total time available per day wouldn't change. Even the short posts take some time before I’m at least somewhat happy with them. I’ve been up when I wanted to be asleep a couple times because I couldn't stop taking a sentence apart and putting it back together, and if this sounds like complaining, it isn’t. The fact is, a life where I spend hours and hours writing is exactly the life I want. The immediate impact it’s having is that I want to do much more of it.

For kicks, here is something I wrote beforehand about the reasons I might not really want to do this:

10 Fears About Blogging

1. Fear of freaky people. What if my putting myself in the public space draws the attention of some psychotic individual who stalks me, threatens me, otherwise puts me in danger, or worse, directs this toward someone I love?
2. Fear of public ridicule. I don’t mind being corrected if I’m wrong. I just don’t know if I want that to happen where anyone can watch.
3. Fear that I have nothing to say. Lots of people want to be writers. Lots of people think they are writers. What if I get about a week into it and realize that all I had to say amounted to a couple of paragraphs?
4. Fear of becoming a different type of writer. What if I lose the ability to write anything deep, anything long, anything except blogs?
5. Fear of overcommitment. What if posting something every day turns into a source of major stress? What if I can’t go on vacation without worrying about it?
6. Fear of selling out. What if I don’t say what I really think?
7. Fear of saying too much. Some things aren't meant to be shared with the whole world. What if this medium tempts me to publicize a whole lot of overpersonal information that I’ll regret?
8. Fear of exposure. Blogs are really just a reflection of someone’s personality, which is why I am devoted to some, and can't seem to get into others despite really liking the idea of what they're trying to do. What if I do it and don’t like what I see?
9. Fear of trendiness. I am doing this late, after tons of people have already started and gotten tired of it. Maybe having your own blog is already something embarrassingly cliché.
10. Fear of redundancy. Related to 9, there are millions of blogs out there already. Why do we need another one? What if all I’m doing is adding to the information overload? Well, I am, of course. But none of those other blogs are mine.
    

You may wonder, do I generate such endless what-if scenarios for everything I do? The answer is, quite often, yes.