Blogathon! Day 1

I’ve decided to join a month long Blogathon. OK, kind of crazy, but I’m so unstructured (I can see family and friends nodding in agreement on this) that this might actually jumpstart more disciplined writing time. I’ve always wondered why I can be obsessive about exercising daily but haven’t yet found a writing routine that works. So, blogging daily from June 1st to June 30^th—self-imposed labor. Will it work?

Until today, I’ve blogged intermittently usually when I’ve traveled or seen an exhibit worth mentioning. I’d like to say I whip out prose with facility. But the truth is I’m a slow writer. Usually, I spill it all out on a page, and then I massage it forever. And therein lies the rub.  By the time I slog my way through words and sentences and grafs (cut and paste, now there’s a great invention), the articles I mean to send out into the unsolicited ether are mostly outdated. Or need to be updated. (It’s really no comfort to know that most travel books are old before they are published.) So, this Blogathon is an experiment in fast, focused writing.

I’ve often said I write to deadline—i.e, a real paying gig—and I’ve never missed one.  To accomplish this, I give myself a false deadline and convince myself it’s real. For articles, usually a week. For books, at least a month. That way, I can forget about what I’ve written for a time and look at an article or chapter with fresh eyes and spend the next hours and days editing like a lunatic locked away. Of course, my eyes are hardly fresh not to mention nearsighted. I recently sent out an essay I thought was perfect, only to discover—having not looked at it for six months—that it still needed tweaking. (Thank heaven for great editors.) But a daily, non-paying Blogathon deadline? We’ll see.

Well, dear readers, this is a long-winded way to say this is my June 1st blog. Stay with me (or not). Having just returned from a month in Paris, I will attempt to meet the daily deadline on all things Parisian (hence the photo of Paris’s most visual cliché) in my next blog posts. Hell, I may even figure out how to organize the blog. Until tomorrow.