Full-Time Blogging
During my flight earlier this afternoon I started writing an article tentatively titled “I Should Blog Full Time, But I Can’t”, the first two paragraphs of which I have included below:
"I absolutely love to write. Writing is one of my favorite things to do. That’s why, in part, I started blogging; however, back then my interest in the coding side of the business trumped my interest in writing, and served as the driving force behind my continued involvement in this space. Today, many things, including my motivations for continuing to write online, have changed: the likes of John Gruber and Jim Dalrymple have transformed this industry from a hobby space to a profession that, while it would be a stretch to designate it as respected, continues to gain widespread regard as it slowly becomes less strange to say, ‘I write for a living.’
“When I started this website just over a month ago during Thanksgiving break, I had fanciful aspirations that I would one day be able to take writing for this site full time and earn a comfortable living doing the thing I love, much as the bloggers I hold in high esteem have successfully done. I still have this goal; however, just over a month later I have been sobered by the harsh realization that, at least as it stands now, I can’t write full time even though I desperately want to. It’s not simply a matter of not having the time anymore as I return to school next week though, for I am of the firm belief that it is never a question of not having enough time to do something but instead a question regarding your desire to do that something over all the other somethings in your life, but also”
The first paragraph still holds true; it is in the second paragraph, however, the I found issue and cause to eventually rejected the premise of this article. I spent nearly half an hour trying to figure out just what it was that was stopping me from writing more regularly, trying to decide how I was going to finish that last sentence. But try as I might I could not come up with a single defensible position, especially after I wrote my short Merlinism at the end of the second paragraph. That’s when I realized, 38000 feet in the air, that I needed to start taking my own advice: I don’t need shorter school days in order to write more regularly and possibly even at a level where I could take this site from a hobby as it is now to a revenue-generating enterprise: although those would be nice, I need, as Merlin Mann said in the first episode of Back to Work, the compensatory muscles to do exactly what I need to sit in a chair and move my hands. As I strayed from the simple truth I began attempting to ask the wrong questions in order to solve the wrong problem, when in actuality I should have been spending that time doing the very thing I was trying in all the wrong ways to accomplish more of; I should have simply been writing.
I still don’t feel able to take writing for this site full time yet, but I do intend to continue creating in the hopes of perfecting my skills and developing my own voice that, someday, will hopefully ring out above all the others competing for the same time and attention I aim to occupy.