Not a great sign when I realize I forgot to post yesterday and my first impulse is just to stop with the micro blogging. There’s a definite free write feeling to it—remember free write days? We didn’t do them in MFA, but in undergrad there were the occasional days when you could just tell the instructor did not want to instruct and it’d be a free write. I don’t think it happened often. Though it did happen a few times. The most helpful time was when we rewrote the short story we were working on from memory. It’s a great generative device, leaving out the things you forget; I remember I worked from that draft. Sure, I think the story is crap now but it was undergrad and what can you do.
For years after that experience I tried to duplicate it but never did. Mostly for lack of trying. Having forty-five minutes to work on something where I’m only supposed to be working on that thing and that thing is writing… it’s been a while. And those conditions get harder to recreate the older I get. I mean, now I can’t even reliably set aside a time to work on a micro blog post.
I think I’m taking next month off. We’ll see. This exercise hasn’t amounted to anything yet and—while I didn’t have any goals in mind—some sense of progress or momentum would help. I haven’t had either of those reactions to it, just another item to check off the bullet journal list.