Ramsey has a blog post by Blog Tyrant that I make myself go back to every so often.
“Why you are not a writer” is a list of what we do instead of writing.
That list of important things like ‘getting set up to write’ that take longer to get ready than actual writing.
I spent last week beating myself up a bit I because I set out to blog everyday in 2015.
Blogging everyday is not going well, I write everyday but I don’t post every day. I ‘forget’ or ‘wait to finish’ a post.
Chose yourself
The main reason is that I am trying to be both George Orwell and Seth Godin everyday.
Both these writers are millions of words ahead of me already AND are published authors.
Yet it seems to escape me that George and Seth might have had a few tough days on the way. Do you think they wrote some dud content and thought about giving up at some point?
A the time of this blog I have completed 260,751 words in 750words.com with over 9,000 words so far this month. It is not as if I am struggling to ‘put pen to paper’ if anything I just can’t wait to finish everything else so I can get back to writing!
I don’t avoid the writing. Right now as I am writing this I’m charged with energy and I can feel myself smiling. I am thinking about my flickr account to and what photo to use , I love that I use my own pictures.
At EXACTLY the same time I am almost falling asleep with resistance.
This happens a lot when I am working on something important to me. I think it is the tail end of depression or something related to that. I just check out, my eyelids feel heavy and I start to fall asleep. It’s my unwanted defence mechanism against making progress in something I want to do.
Careful what you wish for.
At the end of 2014 I moved my website to the Rainmaker Platform. I chose a simple theme that works with one picture as a ‘featured image’ without all the pissing around and resizing.
Now I have a super fast Rainmaker website built on WordPress that requires no pissing about and updates – all I have to do is write.
With my new site”Power Blogging” went well to begin with and then I started to overthink it all.
I researched and developed amazing strategies for how my website would save the world and get me a Nobel Peace prize.
Of course this is all in my head, the sharp rise in traffic I’d created resumed to a flatline when I stopped posting.
Before this what I needed was a website that loaded and had this and that, I needed to get set up so I could write.
But I am finding things to do, like search for plugins for my site I don’t need and can’t use. I think how I can repurpose the content I make, even before I have made it.
Which is even more dumb because I don’t need to so any of this – doing it is a habit.
What I really need is…
A whole day to get organised.
To sit down and think out what I will do and how I will do it. Then I can make a list, then put it in a project tool and then build prototypes.
Except I don’t.
I have never been more ready for life the universe and everything. I know what to do, where to do it and how to do it.
Last week was a slow and unproductive one. I felt crap for a few days and was very scared that I was falling back into the depression I worked so hard to beat last year.
I nearly did fall back, there were a couple of minutes on certain days where I just could not be bothered to do anything.
Songs and other noise played in my head which meant I could not think, lying on the couch to watch Netflix non stop seemed a great way to ‘relax’ – which is secret depression code for “check out and to escape.”
When I felt like this I made myself write, make good wholesome food, read with #Babybernie or post a task to Fancy Hands.
As soon as I was in one of these sequences and I was in motion and I felt better. I have found the best thing to ‘get back in the game’ is meditate.
It is amazing how sitting still with the solid promise of feeling better 20 minutes later is the last action my body and mind want to take.
Just one little step back in the right direction got me back on track again.
This has taken months of trust and acceptance within myself to let this ‘instant karma reboot’ happen.
Making ideas happen
I have somewhere great to write here @90mainyard. Two brilliant machines to write on – a Chromebook and MacBook Pro (cause I is a pro) and I know that when I meditate first thing in the morning and then write my whole day works.
I read to improve the way I work with Trello, Asana, Slack, Google Apps and Nimble. Recently I have read in depth about the “Scrum” project method so I am learning to ‘think as a Trello board’.
Plan A. Ready to go.
The only obstacle in the little bit in me that I seem to have to fight with. I am set up, have the tools to work in a fluid way and I am lucky to work on projects that engage and excite me. There is a little demon I need to crush. It is the demon that tells me I am not good enough, that people will not value my work and that I am wrong.
The upside of this demon is I have developed a mechanism that is reading and writing non stop to slay it.
I know at the end of 2015 I will have my words on my blog with my pictures – this is plan A and I believe in it.
One of those blogs will be the eulogy of my little self destruct demon.
