This post may be roughly my 100th blog post. The exact 100th post was rain, rain, come again written earlier this week. I’ve averaged a post about every three weeks for six years (the first post, Shrek and Human Supremacy, turns six years old on November 3).

I’ve been writing this blog since 2019. I’m pretty proud of that—few personal blogs make it this far. In some significant sense, I’ve written more blog posts than the vast majority of humans in the observable universe.

As I reflect on this fact, I have to say that writing has been a remarkably consistent part of my life. I started writing regularly in 2015, when I started keeping a “life log” that was a one-to-three sentence description of every day. That gradually turned into a journal, which I write about twice a week. Some fraction of what lands in my journal goes onto this blog.

I’ve written before about abiding interests. I’d say writing could be counted as one of them. Writing, I feel, is actually my way of transmitting thought out to the world. I do this for many reasons. It is therapeutic; when thoughts are on the page, they’re no longer in my head, and I have more space to think. I also like sharing my thoughts with others, and sometimes this is handy when someone asks me a question I’ve thought about before (e.g., my job-searching piece). The other great reason is to have a record of my thoughts, so that years from now I can look back and see how I was thinking. (Another reason, more sci-fi, is so that the AI can learn how I think and replicate my thought process—create some form of immortality. I used to care more about this legacy aspect, not so much anymore)

There are so many reasons to write, and so many experiences to write about, that sometimes I stress myself out by not writing enough. Writing, as it turns out, takes time and energy. If you’re looking to write 100+ blog posts, I’d say I’ve found the following things important:

• Have a place and time where you feel comfortable writing.
• Have a low bar for publishing posts, at least until you hit a steady clip.
• Write what you feel and don’t worry what other people think, because the main beneficiary of your writing is you.

I generally don’t think too much about writing artistically or beautifully, unless the mood strikes me, but even just writing things in a readable form takes some energy. On the other hand, you could say that writing all the time distracts from being in the present moment. My friend said he was in a writing class once, and someone named Georgina was absent, and the professor said, “I guess Georgina is busy living her life rather than spending time writing about it.”

One great book about writing is 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing by Gary Provost. I read it a long time ago because I was captured by the following sentence, which is self-recommending:

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”

Another great book about writing is What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. It’s more of a memoir about Murakami’s relationship to writing and running (which are rather similar, the more you think about it). My ex, Aliyah, gave it to me when we were dating in college—aptly, since I like to both write and run. I consider myself a pretty social person but I do really enjoy both of these activities as solitary pastimes. In some ways, writing is a way of communing with others but in a slower-paced, more thought-out sense.

Murakami got his start writing when he ran a bar in his twenties. He would close shop at 1 a.m., and use the wee hours of the morning to hone his craft until he wrote a book. I do find that the late nights are perfect for sitting back, burning the midnight oil, and cracking open the proverbial journal (I tend to write on a laptop with the Dvorak keyboard). I find my thoughts come fluidly at this time, like I’m talking to an old friend.