A good blogging

National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) is a lot like a prisoner’s tour of a medieval torture chamber. After surviving “the rack,” our hapless hero is immediately transferred to a bed of nails and before recovering from that ordeal, he’s subjected to the thumb-screws, then it’s on to the bed of coals, hot tar bath … and beyond.

I decided to enroll in this diabolical program this year. The idea is to promote interest in blogging (posting information regularly online for the general benefit of just about anyone) and to help current bloggers develop the discipline necessary to post more often.

Though I’ve been averaging about a blog every OTHER day during my trip, I thought I’d be able to step up the pace while in Florida and elevate my output. I accepted the challenge.

Yesterday’s posting broke the record for monthly output and today I’ll come within a week of achieving victory. A week of prose. Perhaps prose performed weakly, but an examination of these offerings reveals that I don’t allow quality to impede productivity.

I guess it’s a newspaper thing. Daily deadlines make it difficult to rise to a level that could be called “great.” A great newswriter is likely to produce copy that falls far short of most other scribes. Even with a team of support personnel (editors and proofreaders), news writers just can’t create perfection and light in the quick and dirty world of journalism.

I admit that a percentage of pieces appearing in this blog have received short shrift in the editing and proofreading phases. I hope most readers understand that this style of writing is often little more than free writing – an enterprise often considered to be a lead-up activity for real writing.

Now, I’m not ashamed of adhering to lower standards, I’m rather proud of having written nearly 150 episodes – on a rather random set of topics, but hopefully providing a sense of what’s been on my mind as I roam the land. If I had decided to maintain higher standards, I suspect that my output volume would have been a lot less.

Some reader who feels compelled to keep up to date on my adventures might celebrate a smaller stream of data; but others may sympathize with my desire to explore my thinking while exploring North America.

Whether it’s a shortcoming or a saving grace, I have tried to avoid simply chronicling what I’ve seen and offering personal descriptions of scenery and other things encountered along the road. I’ve hoped to make the blog as much an exploration of myself as of the countryside.

Whatever readers may think, the NaBloPoMo challenge is nearing its end – as is my long journey. Seeing the light at the end of those tunnels makes it seem easier – and nearly imperative – to see things through.

I won’t promise to continue writing every day, but I suspect that I’ll do at least as well as before November 1. And I don’t expect that I’ll be winning any awards for the quality of writing I’ve created – or that much, if any, of these paragraphs ever appear in print.

But I recommend taking on challenges. They require commitment and daily action – two qualities I tend to admire in others. That makes me feel proud of my accomplishments. And I can’t come up with a reason not to conclude that being proud of myself is enough.

Onward.

By the Way: I found a year-old posting on You Tube. This apparently Canadian fellow describes his trials and tribulations with NaBloPoMo. He seems like a likeable fellow and “meeting” through blogs and You Tube postings is all about finding people (and more) you never could in the pre-web world.