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Nathan Bransford has a post up called Is Blog Fatigue on the Rise? He points out that more and more bloggers are calling it quits, and that he himself has been slowing down:

I’m sure it hasn’t escaped the notice of regular blog readers that the posting on this blog has grown, well, a bit more sporadic. After posting every weekday for nearly five years, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to keep up that pace.

For me it’s not about running out of ideas or the occasional negativity (though that can be a drag), it’s just a time crunch.

There’s no doubt that blogging takes more energy than you’d expect. WordPress and Blogspot are largely graveyards for blogs that fizzle out after a few weeks. The ones that survive are the exceptions. I’m not saying it’s incredibly difficult, but it is a commitment.

As for me, I’ve kept up this blog with a new post every weekday for over six months, with no signs of exhaustion yet. Which isn’t to say that the various Blogging Obstacles don’t rear their heads once in a while. It’s smart to keep your eye on these foes, and Nathan’s done a good job of listing the most common culprits:

1. Forgetting to post. Fortunately I’m safe from this one. I get up half an hour early every day for the sole purpose of writing the day’s post. I’m not likely to forget why I’m up.

2. “The negativity that comes with putting yourself out there.” (His words.) This one’s tough to define, but I know exactly what he’s talking about. Basically this comes in two forms: active and passive. Active negativity is when people send you nasty e-mails and comments, and fortunately I’ve escaped that so far – y’all are a nice bunch of people!

Passive negativity, on the other hand, just means that you feel like nobody’s listening. Do I have enough readers? Do I have enough followers? These questions are mostly silly and unproductive, yet I hear them in my brain more often than I’d like. I do my best to ignore them.

3. Cost/benefit is no longer worth it. Cost being how much time you put in, benefit being what you get out of it – and what you expect to get out of it. For me, this works out pretty well. Cost is minimal because, as I’ve recently mentioned, my blogging time generally has a hard deadline of forty minutes per day. On the benefit side, my expectations are modest: I’m looking to get some practice writing for an audience, meet other writers (and readers, and cool people in general), and establish a name for myself in public (even if it’s only in a small way). Notice that none of these is tied directly to money. As long as a reasonable number of people keep reading, it’s worth it for me.

4. Running out of ideas. This is probably the one I worry about most. In general, I try to keep my posts on-topic: writing, reading, publishing, books. I try not to stray too far into my personal life. However, that does mean I have to be constantly thinking of new ideas on a relatively limited topic range, which can be tricky when I’m posting every day. So far my ideas list has grown steadily, with new ideas added faster than I can post them, so it hasn’t been a problem. But I could still imagine the well running dry somewhere down the road.

Well, that’s me. What about you? Is blog fatigue taking its toll on you, or are you still going strong? Ever quit a blog before?

Back in June, I mentioned that certain people were tossing out perfectly good books at the local recycling center, and that certain other people were, ahem, reclaiming said castaways by fishing them out of the book bin and taking them home.

I’ll reiterate now that the latter practice is both illegal and deplorable, and that I myself would never, ever root around in a cardboard box full of books, in public, nor take home the most promising candidates. And I certainly wouldn’t keep doing this until I had accumulated over three hundred books in my basement, where they remain to this day.

Anyway: on a recent trip to the recycling center, I made an astounding discovery. Someone at that august institution had taken the extraordinary step of placing a heavy wooden lid over the top of the book box. There’s a slot in the box for dropping in books. None of the other recycling boxes (for plastics, metal, glass, etc.) have been treated in this way.

The message is clear: the era of book-thievery is over. And I, for one, am just glad to see those miscreants thwarted.

Still, it does seem a bit…extreme, doesn’t it? I mean, granted, I wasn’t the only patron who made a habit of, uh, not stealing books. I’ve seen it happen plenty of times. But at a facility whose sole reason for existing is to make new use of old junk, is it really such a big deal if people are doing some of the work for them?

I can think of four reasons why they might care:

1. Privacy. If someone throws out a book that contains some kind of personal information, they might reasonably expect it will be disposed of without anyone else seeing it.

2. Legality. Stealing is, I suppose, still technically against the law.

3. Safety. All sorts of hazards are imaginable – moldy books, stray bits of broken glass. Probably not something they want to be liable for.

4. Money. I confess a deep ignorance of how the recycling process works after my part in it is over, but if anyone is paying these people to pick up the material they gather, then book thievery is a loss of revenue for them.

Assuming #4 is correct, it seems like the most likely reason they would put a stop to it. It also means the aforementioned thievery was not, in fact, entirely a victimless crime, and I would feel a little bad about it. If I had ever done it. Just a little.

Still, I’ve gotta say: any town where people are so hungry for books that it takes a heavy piece of plywood to keep them out…can’t be all bad.

No time to write a post today. Real life interferes.

Instead, here’s one of my all-time favorite poems:

The Orange
Wendy Cope

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange –
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave –
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

Yesterday, as part of my Day Job, I went to a three-hour training class about how to be more effective in an organization. The focus was on the corporate world, but one part in particular was relevant to our interests.

The guy put up a slide that said Ability + Will = Performance. In other words, if you have the ability to do something and the will to do something, that thing is gonna get done. Pretty straightforward, right? Not exactly multivariable calculus.

Then he said something else. He said it almost in passing, on his way to making another point, and I don’t think it was part of his standard spiel. But it hit me hard, and I wrote it down right then. Here’s what he said:

“Ability is rarely the obstacle.”

Of course we’ve all heard this kind of thing before: realize your potential, you can do whatever you set your mind to, etc. If you wanted a fortune cookie, you would’ve gone to Happy Garden Buffet. I get it.

Yet think about this for a second. Ability is rarely the obstacle. If this is true – and I believe it is – then here’s what we’re really saying: Your long-term success or failure is generally not a matter of “can’t,” but a matter of “won’t.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean you have the necessary ability right now. Much of the struggle – in writing a novel, in managing a project, whatever – is improving your own abilities. But that, in turn, comes right back to your will. Your drive. Your inner fire.

What’s holding you back? Ability – or will?

On a typical morning, my alarm clock (read: cell phone vibrating on the nightstand) wakes me up at 5:30. By the time I shower, iron clothes, brush teeth, etc., it’s 6:00, which is blog-writing time. I hit “Publish” around 6:40 and dash out the door to make it to work by 7.

(By the way, if you’re wondering about the timestamp, today’s an exception because I got up early for non-blog-related reasons. But moving on.)

Occasionally – like with the blog comment gender experiment – I do some prep work ahead of time, but most of the time I don’t. Generally I just pick a topic from my idea list the night before, mull it over a little as I’m ironing, and then I have forty minutes, give or take, to bust that sucker out. I don’t have any extra posts lying around for days I can’t come up with anything, so basically it’s publish or perish. Of course, I do occasionally cop out, but I can’t do that too often, now can I?

This forty-minutes-or-bust mentality is a deliberate choice. I’ve actually had two other blogs before this one, and with both of them, I wrote posts the afternoon before I published. It turned into a real problem because I would end up taking an hour, two hours, or even more, fiddling with the post and trying to get everything exactly right. (Also I used to try and find an image for every single post, which takes longer than you would expect.) The blog devoured my free time like a hungry titan.

With this blog, I have a hard deadline every morning, which is actually very liberating. Forty minutes and done. Not sure if it’s good enough? Too bad. Publish and move on. You’ll have another chance tomorrow.

(What’s that? Based on the quality of my posts, you would have estimated four minutes? Hypothetical reader, why would you even say that? That is hurtful and entirely nonconstructive!)

People talk a lot about knowing when the time is right to “let go” of a novel, or a story. Two competing forces – your own drive for perfection, and the necessity of publishing the damn thing before Ragnarok rolls around – battle it out and eventually compromise. It’s tough to get the hang of this battle, to know when a work isn’t ready yet and when you finally need to just kick it out of your house, to accept that sometimes the answer is both of the above.

One really good thing about blogging, especially on a time limit, is that it forces you to face that battle in microcosm every day. The stakes are lower, so it’s a good training ground. You learn to get comfortable with hitting “Publish.”

If you blog, do you have a time limit?

And if you don’t blog, uh, do you like almond butter? Cause man, that shit is tasty. You know what I’m saying?

In conclusion: almond butter.

I keep a spreadsheet of all the books I read. The oldest entry is January 2, 2010: Hyperion, Dan Simmons. The most recent is October 1, 2011: The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis. (Highly recommended, by the way, even if – like me – you’re not a Christian.)

I keep this spreadsheet because 1) I’m the kind of person who requires very little convincing to start a spreadsheet, 2) I think it will be interesting to go back later when I’m older and see what I was into as a young’un, and 3) reading a book gives me a real sense of accomplishment, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to have a record of that.

(Ever noticed how much difference a few degrees make in phraseology? “Warm and fuzzy” sounds nice. “Hot and fuzzy” sounds vaguely illegal. Be careful out there.)

Anyway.

I guess finishing a book makes me feel kind of like leveling up in an RPG. Or if not increasing by a whole level, at least earning some experience points. I feel like I’ve improved myself, somehow, as a person.

(Brian Buckley) < (Brian Buckley + The Crying of Lot 49)

There is some element of actual truth to this. Books do enrich the mind (or, if they don’t, boy have I made some bad life choices). Yet that alone doesn’t entirely account for the sense of accomplishment I get.

If I’m honest, I think part of it is selfish. I like to be that guy – the guy who, when somebody asks “Have you ever read Don Quixote?” can thoughtfully sip his martini and say, “Why yes, in fact, yes I have.” The guy who’s cool and worldly, where cool and worldly is defined as even geekier than normal. I like having lit cred.

(Note: I do not drink martinis.)

So the spreadsheet isn’t quite as noble-minded as I’d like to make it sound. But then, I suppose there are worse sins in this world than literary selfishness. I suppose if I can look back on my life and the worst thing I find is that I’m a little too jazzed about my book list, I’m probably doing all right.

I mean, at least I’m not getting hot and fuzzy.

Do you keep a list of what you’ve read?

I remember once, a long time ago, someone asked me what the point of fiction was. Why waste your time reading (let alone writing) novels when nonfiction is so much more instructive? It wasn’t a mean or spiteful question. They were just curious. They didn’t get it.

I remember I was taken aback. I didn’t know what to say. It was like trying to explain why I breathe. I think I said something about how you can learn from fiction, too. Maybe something about how reading fiction is fun, enjoyable. But I knew that I was missing the point, that none of it got to the heart of why I read (let alone write).

That was then, this is now. Certain recent events have reminded me that – how can I put this? – life is occasionally shitty.

Of course bad things happen; we know this; some people are reminded of it much more often than others. But if you are cheerful enough or strong enough or British enough, you can deal with it in a positive frame of mind. “Life is occasionally shitty,” you brightly opine, “but I’ll make the best of it.”

The alternative is that the external becomes internal, that Bad Stuff enters your mind and shakes hands with your soul and kicks off its shoes and helps itself to a cup of coffee and gets comfortable in your recliner. This is when you go from having a bad mood to a bad month, from thinking that “life is shitty” to “life is shit.” It is a withdraw, a deadening, an irrational hatred, an anti-enlightenment.

Here’s something you already know, but it bears repeating: this Bad Mental Stuff, this brain poison, is bullshit. Not bullshit in the sense that it doesn’t exist, or doesn’t matter, but bullshit in the sense that, if you let it, it will destroy you.

Fuck it. Seriously. Fuck. That. Shit.

Perhaps at some point you have asked yourself this question: what is the meaning of life? Helpfully, I have the answer: the meaning of life is to create and protect beauty. Heavy stuff on a Thursday morning, I know, but stay with me for just a second longer and then you can look at cat videos again.

Beauty is the opposite of bullshit. Life is the opposite of death. Fundamentally they are both about the same thing: never giving up. It is a battle and it is a war and both sides have their weapons.

Fiction is not about teaching you facts or making you feel better. Of course it does both these things, and they are good and important things to do, but they are accessories, accoutrements, nonessential.

Here’s the essence. Fiction is beautiful; fiction is life; and that is all.