For some reason I like doing things the long, hard stupid way, and this blog is no exception. If you’re planning to post something every single day, it would probably be easier if you had a bunch of drafts; a backlog of posts that you could publish at any time. I have neither.
Every day, I sit down and wonder what I’m going to write about, and I write it (unless I really can’t). The reason for that, of course: this blog is the backlog; the posts are the drafts. I simply share with you what others might keep private until it’s “good enough” because… why not?
There’s something liberating about hammering out a post and immediately typing ship into my terminal—an alias that instantly commits and pushes changes to the main branch of the GitHub repo, making the post live. I’ve toyed with doing it every time I hit save.
For some reason, the idea of a backlog feels like cheating to me, and the idea of a bunch of half-written drafts just hasn’t worked for me yet. Maybe it will one day; maybe both will. For now though I like to sit down, engage my brain (or very purposely not) and just start writing.
One reason is that I want to stay open to each and every day. I rarely write about what happened on a given day, but the thing that happened might inspire the post. I wrote yesterday’s post after telling a friend (who had just been to London) that 5% of my heart still yearned for it.
The drafts that I write here and the backlog I’m building by publishing them will feed the essays that I want to write. The books I might eventually write. The moments I simply want to recall a memory, regardless of literary merit. With that said: welcome to my drafts.