Any sort of daily writing can feel like a chore. For many writers, it’s a weight we take up willingly, but it’s still a weight.

There’s a cartoon I can’t find at the moment (at least not via Google Image Search) that shows Sisyphus of myth doing the thing, and at the top of his hill is a guy at a small desk with a typewriter. The boulder slips away, as of course it does, but there’s a conversation,
“Still pushing that rock?” the writer asks.
“Yep,” Sisyphus replies, “Still writing that novel?”
Which concisely sums it up, neatly encapsulating the feeling that writing is an endless, thankless, hellish task.

If you’re a journalist, this is the job: push it up the hill, and then start over. The assignment is open-ended; you can win a Pulitzer and that’s nice and all but doesn’t change the fact that you have to fill 50-odd pages of newsprint (or feed the starving web algorithms) every day. If you don’t, someone else will. If you don’t like it, go write a book or something.

Bloggers aren’t journalists, and we’re typically not paid [?] [I don’t think this has changed since 2014; if you have an update hmu] so the deadlines are different and the stakes are smaller. But it’s built into the etymology of the word: “web logs” are—or were—Logs: diaries & journals. They could just as easily be weekly or monthly or fortnightly or some other regular schedule but if there isn’t a regular schedule, readers sort of… wander. It’s not that they don’t like you, or that they’ve forgotten you, but you key into something fundamental when you can give your readers that consistent daily hit. Preferably at the same time every day, and they will never say so (ok some will) but they mean every day unless you’re dead and even so, some will lament you weren’t keeping a buffer. Or didn’t have the ending pre-written.

This bleeds over to twitch streamers now, and to YouTube channels, who have the same expectations that they’ll be on every day no breaks no vacations. And occasionally to specific hosts on YouTube; it’s fine that the channel chugs along and produces content But Where’s Tom’s Wacky Thursday WTF-Fest! Did you fire Tom? BOYCOTT. “I mean, Tom’s back now but his show just doesn’t seem the same since he took two weeks off last June for his brother’s wedding and father’s funeral”

Even if you personally have a passion for the material, reader expectations can become a weight.

10 years ago, when the previous version of my personal blog launched [now at archive.rocketbomber.com] I was publishing “bestseller charts” for manga on a weekly basis. When I started I loved the challenge of it – of figuring out how to get the data out of the barest scraps of info off of public-facing sales sites and attempting to find the underlying numbers, even if the best I could manage was comparative and not, you know, actual hard sales data. I stopped when Borders went out of business and other online retailers basically conceded the game to Amazon. But before the whole thing fell apart I was spending about 4 hours a week (and $99 a month for a host to run my web scrapers on VMs) to produce… drumroll please… basically a top 10 list. More often than not, a top 10 list not much different from what you’d find in the NYT books section on Sundays, or with a click on Amazon.

It was a weight. I carried it for a couple of years because I like the subject matter (manga and comics) and because I liked the mental puzzle part of it. But unless something changed, it wasn’t a weight I could carry without help—and when the change hit, it wasn’t to help me but to make it all seem kind of useless. I’d pushed that rock up Sisyphus’s hill and discovered why it always slips away from him.

Even when I had *loads* of time, I couldn’t always manage daily updates. When I was unemployed, the job of finding a new job typically took up about 4 hours of my day. There was time to write. (I did write, doing some link-blogging and writing a few music essays.) But even with time, I couldn’t always pick up that weight. When you’re feeling down and worthless, you can’t always put on the Happy Face to write about something you love, or even muster the energy for the srs bzns posts that don’t need your enthusiasm but still need you to, ah, write.

Even when you are employed and relatively happy and there’s food in the pantry and the rent is paid and all outstanding bills are 3 to 4 weeks out: it can be hard to pick up that weight. Here’s a new game, here’s a funny video, here’s Twitter. Distractions abound. Go for a walk. Do a little more research on that one thing. Lunch with a friend. Hell, clean the house.

When you’re avoiding the tyranny of the empty page, you can get so much cleaning done. I’ve cleaned a bathroom and recaulked a shower enclosure rather than re-open the working-document-slash-gaping-wound of a draft.

##

Why now?

I’m not sure, entirely.

I mean, the blog has always been here, I pay the hosting to keep it going. I even tidied up a bit, moved things around, installed a newer version of the CMS, and made everything ready to blog again…

And left it to sit for a year.

Midlife crisis, maybe? Attempting to reclaim my youth with a brand new red corvette convertible or harley, except I’m an online nerd so instead of rustling my thinning hair on the open road, I pop the top on a new blog platform and take it for a spin?

Whatever the motivation, I feel a little better and pretty much rested and so, I’m looking at the top of that hill. I intimately know this weight, and yet, I take up the weight. I start pushing that rock.