Blinking cursor

It's one of those days: the days I regret having compelled myself to write a blog post--daily. Writer's block is a common enough problem, I know, and I've written about it before (but I'm not giving you the links, both because I am too lazy to find them and because I doubt you'd want to read that drivel again anyway), and it multiplies like rabbits (I told you I'm stumped for creativity here, what'd you expect but another cliche?) when you have something that is neither interesting to others nor pertinent to your daily life on your mind.

In this case, the future. And, more specifically, the time period two months from now when I will find myself suddenly Fulbright grant-less, surviving on my savings until I land a so-called "real" job, preferably one involving editing. The logistics of those are complicated at best, and the question of how to best arrange them is  what I've been stewing on today.

Ironically, though, now that I've gotten started talking about my writer's block, I have a topic--tada!--and it even neatly ties together the first two paragraphs: daily posts are a terrible idea. Why? Well, allow my old writer's block friend, the list, tell you...

1. You run out of ideas! Seriously, NO one's life is interesting enough to be written about on a daily basis, and mine is even less so. What did I do today? Hmm, I went to school, taught, hung out with my coworkers, came home, ate dinner, went to Chinese class, went to the gym, went to an ATM, came home, researched copyediting jobs. I'm sorry, dear readers, that I can't give you back the time you spent reading that last worthless sentence...

I'm sorry, also, for the fact that...

2. You make dozens of stupid mistakes! As a creative writing graduate/writing tutor/editorial intern/newspaper editor/English teacher/overall grammar nerd/writer, I would say I've gained a pretty thorough understanding of the English language and, by extension, the errors it often contains. My job often depends on catching them; heck, you know that job stuff I talked about earlier? Yeah, those potential jobs would consist entirely of catching writing errors. I love doing it.

...except when it's in my own writing. But the thing is, it often is, especially in first draft mode. Something else I learned as a creative writing student/writing tutor/editorial intern/newspaper editor/English teacher/overall grammar nerd/writer is that your first draft always sucks. It just does! I would even go so far as to say it's supposed to, up to a point. The purpose of your first draft is not perfection; the purpose of your first draft is to get your ideas on paper and in a rough semblance of how you want them to be. It's not until you hit the later drafts that you start fixing things and aiming for perfect.

But see, here's the thing about daily blog posts: they're all first drafts. They have to be! This post I'm writing right now, I began at roughly 1am; when I finish it, I'm going to hit post, close my laptop, and go to bed. Tomorrow, I know, I'll pick up my computer again and re-read what I wrote, only to discover scores of little errors--the errors I hate, the errors I want to make my living correcting. But there they sit, staring me in the face in my own writing. It's just the nature of the beast!

3. You end up writing entire posts on the phenomena surrounding writing.

'Nuf said.