Of course, just after I decide to take a blogging break, here are ten reasons to keep at it: Ten Important Things I’ve Learned About Blogging | Confessions of a Pioneer Woman | Ree Drummond. Well, four reasons to keep at it, and six other suggestions for how to blog happy that aren’t directly related to keeping at it.
This one particularly got me:
9. If you have writer’s block, push through and blog anyway.
I posted the first chapter of Black Heels on a morning when I woke up with the most raging case of writer’s block, I couldn’t even type my name.
I was sure you’d hate it, but I posted it anyway.
I went on to write forty-plus more chapters.
What if I’d given in to my writer’s block and decided not to blog that day?
I would never have written my Green Acres-meets-War and Peace romance novel.
And my bottom would likely be a little less jiggly.
But I think a blogging sabbatical still might be a decent idea to try to reignite the blogging spark for me. As you can tell, just telling myself I’m not going to blog gets me looking for things to blog about.
I wonder if it’s odd that I use reverse psychology on myself?
Imperfect Happiness 
When I first started to blog, I felt pressure to keep up. Now that it’s half over, I just relax and do what is best for me. I admire that you have kept posting and shared happiness all ocer the world.
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Thank you, Jackie! And thank you for reading!
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You know, I’ve never really thought of blogging as “writing.” I put so much pressure on myself to produce stories, a certain quota per year, and novels, and articles. But I do enjoy blogging, sharing my experiences, and maybe I need to change my way of looking at it. I need to look at it as writing–and when I am down at myself for not wanting to do anything but write my blog, I should remind myself that I am writing, which is the important thing. It so odd, I had never thought of it in that way before. I’ve always seen my blog as… I don’t know. A procrastination device? Or another way of socializing. I think that taking a new perspective will help me a great deal. I can’t really say, “Ugh, I’ve gotten NO writing work done this week!” when in reality, I’ve written two productive blog posts! Thank you for this!
Mel
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You are welcome, Melanie! It popped up on the WordPress Daily Post and it seemed like she’d written it for me. I also liked that she said not to have any set structure in mind for the blog when you start. I think I’ve been bogged down by the idea that I need to have a consistent theme (like the Happiness Project) and didn’t really want to “waste” my time until I had one.
Blogging does feel kind of gratuitous and narcissistic to me sometimes, though. It’s possible that part of the stress of blogging (for me) is this Puritanical sort of notion that I’m not making productive use of my time. But just like when I do five loads of laundry and then look at the dirty dishes and declare that I’ve accomplished nothing that day, I do think that it’s important to recognize blogging as writing. One of my writing profs (who reads my blog, at least sometimes, to my glee), when I would tell her that I’d been doing Morning Pages (from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way) and journaling regularly for years but hadn’t been doing any “real” writing, insisted that what I was doing was writing. Just like someone who’s not published isn’t any less a novelist than someone who has published. What about all of those stories of novelists who were turned down by 127 publishers before their book finally became a bestseller? Of course, I’m not really even trying to publish anything at this point, nor do I have anything I’d be willing to put out there, but I do have my blog. At the very least, perhaps this is getting me used to writing for public consumption and perhaps will, eventually, diminish my fear of failure to the point that I can actually send in some stories/a novel somewhere.
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