30 Day Mind Cleanse

As I've mentioned before, I'm very easily influenced and distracted.  And yes, I would like to be in charge of taxpayer money.  What?

Anyway, one of my favourite internet writers was recently asked "How do you get over writer's block?" (I would link to this specific entry but I can't figure out how.  Here is his blog.  The question is somewhere in there.) His answer was essentially, "Write.  A lot."  This was nothing I hadn't heard before.  I was an English major.  We were told that all the time.  I just never thought it applied to me because (a) I had no desire to be a writer writer and (b) I usually solved writer's block on  papers by not writing them.

But the thing is, at the moment, I almost exclusively write memos and and policy briefs and regression results and legal summaries.  While I am glad for these skills, I would like to maintain my ability to write an interesting, funny paragraph without too much sweat and tears.  Also, there's a part in his answer where he says this: "if you’re experiencing writer’s block...your brain is telling you that it’s being lazy; force it to work anyway. Ninety percent of people who go to a gym don’t want to work out ninety percent of the time they go, but they force themselves to and, after ten minutes or so, their muscles are invested in the workout, the body is releasing endorphins that make them feel good, and they forget why they ever didn’t want to work out in the first place. Your brain’s the same way."  I felt like he was calling me out on both my lack of blog-updating and gym-visiting.

In addition, one of my good friends started her own blog.  It is brilliant and you should absolutely add it to your own blogrolls.  She does not update nearly as much as I would like her to (hint hint) but, as mentioned in one of her entries, she is a big fan of 30-day challenges and sets them for herself about every 30 days.

So put this all together and what do you get?  A long, rambling piece that's made up mostly of other people's writing, you say?  Well, yes.  But also, I am setting myself a 30-day blogging challenge.  I will write every day for 30 days.  These might not actually get published every day, but I will be writing, and at the end of 30 days, there will be 30 blogs.  And I will be 30 days closer to being able to write a really great Christmas letter that people actually want to read, which is, of course, the ultimate goal.