20190122.0430

One of the things I do to try to keep a buffer built in this webspace is to write two posts each time I sit down to write here. I am not as successful in that as I would like to be; I do not manage to write in this webspace each day, and I do not always write two posts when I do. That I occasionally have late updates is proof of that. But it is still good to have a set goal for writing, both generally and in specific projects. Having a focus helps in navigating the tasks, and having a set objective to fulfill helps keep things from dragging on interminably. Endings matter, and I am not alone in noting that they should have come for no few things sooner than they did or yet have done.
My writing goals with this webspace are two-fold. I've noted the two post/day small-scale, short-term goal, and I've discussed before that it is easier to meet that goal when writing verse than when writing prose. (Indeed, it's partly because of that ease that I am returning to my hymns against the Stupid God next month.) With such pieces as these, I aim for a minimum of 500 words per post, and I more or less always achieve that. And I cannot help but remark in doing so that such pieces seem out of reach for many of the students I have and had, while they are more or less daily warm-ups for me--and if they are, I probably ought to be doing better with my writing in other areas than I am.
A thousand words a day is not much of a burden, to be sure, or it should not be if I am pushing them out every day. It sometimes is, yes, as I've remarked, but I feel it ought not to be for me, any more than running scales should be a challenge for instrumentalists (and I probably should run more scales than I do) or running laps is for track-and-field athletes (I'm not one of them, heavy-legged as I am, but I probably ought to exercise more than I do, and by a wide margin). Perhaps if I were to devote more of the energy I expend in putting words in this webspace to producing writing for money, I'd be better off, or my family would. The latter is more important, in any event.
But I am not yet at a point where I can conceive of and sustain a vision for something that might be of enough value to others that they would pay for it. It likely marks me as a failure in a society that prizes entrepreneurialism and assigns value primarily if not entirely based on remuneration. (The validity of such a society is contested, I know, but that particular subject well exceeds the space I am willing to allow it today.) Perhaps someday I may be a success, but until and unless I am, I will keep plugging away at this kind of thing. Even if I'm not a success, I can succeed at doing what I set out to do.