Follow up to: And We’re Back

I think overall, I’ve been pretty good at blogging. At least compared to the average person, I actually do write more than just essays for class. Additionally, I do publish my work. And thirdly, I publish my work rather regularly. Over the past 23 months I’ve been blogging, I’ve written 151 essays, for an average of 6.6 essays a month. (This excludes the gulf of non-blogging between June and December of 2010).

Moreover, to the degree that blogging adds value, blogging is most emphatically not about quantity — you could churn out a post an hour and still be entirely unremarkable and uninsightful, therefore contributing nothing. The internet itself puts out millions of essays a day, so you’re not really contributing if all you count is numbers. Instead, I would much rather post only six essays my entire life, if all six essays answer my six big questions definitively and comprehensively, once and for all.

My most recent posts (since December 2010) have ended up being, in my personal and not-so-humble opinion, of rather good quality — and the ones older than that aren’t too shabby either. My recent posts also have topped out around 3000 words each, meaning I have written 144000 words these past seven months (not counting July).

However, more recently I’ve decided I want to write even more. Despite having a research job for the summer, I have managed to find time to write an essay a day (mainly by cutting down on time wasting) for the past two weeks; something I’ve never been able to pull off before.

Additionally, I’ve wanted to write some essays that are less than 3000 words, but didn’t want to place them in my Monday-Wednesday-Friday format. Thus, all of this has made me want to try something I’ve never thought possible: attempting a post for every weekday.

It’s definitely going to be an experiment; an experiment I reserve the right to stop or suspend at any time. As I wrote in “And We’re Back”:

No commitment to any schedule: It is a lot easier to focus on college and non-blogging projects if I think of this more as a house of essays rather than a blog that requires very regular posting. The reason I stopped blogging altogether was that tri-weekly blogging was too time consuming; especially relative to the amount of readership I was managing. I’d rather lie low and just think of the website as a place for me to post ideas when I have them — this will allow me to keep writing without overloading me and making me quit altogether.

I’d still like to think of my website as a place where I post when I feel like, and not hold my schedule hostage to a pre-defined posting schedule. Thus the idea of an experiment rather than a commitment — I want to see what I can do.

So consider this the start of once-a-weekday essay writings. You’ll now have an excuse to visit on Tuesday, assuming you like reading what I write. If all goes to plan, it should last through August before falling apart with the start of my sophomore year of college.

Followed up in: Experiment Over: New Blogging Schedule and Back for a Third Blogxperiment