The Princess of Planning strikes again

These past couple of days, I have struggled to come up with interesting topics to post. Some days are better than others–some days the inspiration flows freely and other days I’m parched. Unfortunately, even the parched days require a post, especially since I have accepted the Post a Day challenge. Although most days I find myself glad to accept the challenge and impressed that I have gone three weeks and have risen to the occasion, there are the days when I feel too mentally exhausted to write, or when the great post idea never comes.

Enter: Freshly Pressed.

They featured a blog this week that talked about Bloggiesta, an annual weekend-long blogging extravaganza…something I had never heard of, but then again I’m new to the blogosphere. In this post, the writer, Leeswamme, offers wonderful tips to help sustain a blogger throughout Bloggiesta, but I bet these are tips that can help sustain a blogger even during the dry days. A few of the tips really leapt out at me, and they’re so simple that I can’t believe I had never thought of them:

• Write backup posts for a rainy day.
• Write that great post idea from three months back.
• Work on series posts.

Of course! So now, this Princess of Planning is going to start working on ways that she can improve her blogging experience by keeping either a handwritten notebook of topics or prewriting posts that she can publish on those rare but excruciating parched days. The funniest thing is that when I accepted the challenge to post every single day in 2011, part of me thought that that meant that I should compose brand new posts every single day. Well…already I’ve scheduled two posts to show up on my blog the day after I actually wrote them. For both of those posts I chose this option because I wanted to write them while I still remembered the topic.

But what this approach is suggesting is to take stock in the fact that writing every day is difficult, particularly when you are attempting to write on topics that will attract readers. I want to write every day because it keeps me writing at all (and that’s precisely what I need to be doing at this time in my graduate program). But, I am learning to accept my flaws and forgive them in myself as I approach my thirties, which means that complete honesty would force me to admit that coming up with ideas isn’t as easy as it seemed on the outset.

In order to help myself come through on the challenge, then, to get me to the point where I can proudly exclaim that I succeeded, I will actually set myself up for success. I’m going to take Leeswamme’s advice of prewriting entries to post later and to work on the blog posts I always intended to work on.

No matter what, I will write every single day–either on my blog or on my dissertation (most days both), but, dammit, I will write every single day.