In Regards to My Mediocre Blogging Habit

I've been a terrible blogger of late.

I have lots of things that I would love to write about, swarms of things that I would love to share.

But I also like to sleep sometimes and those little things add up to fill the waking hours, things like the looming deadline for my final annotated bibliography and a wonderful family visit over Easter and time with people dear to me and the 50 hours out of every week that are dedicated to my job and the need to occasionally go to the grocery store or do my laundry.

So blogging has been tricky. This isn't a dramatic exit, just a warning that blog posts may be sparse for the next couple of weeks until life settles down a bit. 

How do you prioritize when schedules get full and time gets thin?

A Time to Ponder

Sometimes life flows along smoothly and one is swept along a bobbing current of daily tasks, duties, and pleasures. Other times life feels a bit more like a whirlpool, a dozen, a hundred, or a thousand different demands all passing by with dizzying swiftness.

Life has been a little crazy lately. First, there was August. In August, I was able to spend substantial time at home, resting and being with those I love. But blogging didn't happen.

Then September came and I spent a few weeks learning how to navigate the balance of grad school, a (sometimes more than) full-time job, sanity, and some remote semblance of a social life.

I spent a lot of time in September thinking, too, about this blog and about how it fits into this ever-turbulent season of my life. I thought about what I wanted to accomplish through Halfway Down the Stairs, about whether I should be blogging at all, about whether I should just throw the towel in and close this chapter.

But I love writing and I love blogging and I don't want to let go of this. On the other hand, I think reassessment is healthy. The questions I asked myself gave me a clearer vision and renewed excitement. Donald Miller's post on writing advice was an invaluable guide as I thought through my goals for this space.

I was trying to achieve a daily blogging regimen, but frankly, this was neither practical nor terribly productive. The result was blog posts that neither I nor anyone else wanted to read and frustration when I failed to meet my own standard. Instead, I'm going to try investing more into a few posts each week. There will be more links to writing by authors far better than I, more quotes, less clutter. Sometimes less is more.

A final note: if you receive my blog updates via Facebook, please take a moment to either subscribe by e-mail (don't forget to confirm the subscription!) or find me on Twitter (@emilyadams829). For a variety of reasons, I will no longer be posting blog updates to my Facebook page.

Thank you to all of you who bother to read these words, who care enough to share your thoughts and advice and criticism, and who encourage me with your presence.

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.” - Flannery O'Connor

100 Posts

This is my 100th blog post. It all started in a Barnes and Noble on March 20, 2010. I had been toying with the idea of starting a blog for a while and a conversation with Rachel pushed me over the edge.

I sighed with envy at the bloggers-turned-published-authors evidenced on the shelves around us as we sipped our coffee and chatted. "Just do it," she commanded me. So I did. On March 26, 2010, I published the first post.

My blogging project has been more successful than I imagined it would be. 15 months later, it's still alive. It's inspired me to read more, cook more, and write more. It traces my efforts to set more goals, be more organized, and try out new things.

The most popular post of all time is A Question for My Readers, followed closely by Home is Where the Bread Is.

Traditionally, bloggers post 100 things about themselves to celebrate this milestone. This is, I feel, definitely narcissistic and bordering on creepy.

Instead, in celebration of the 100th post of Halfway Down the Stairs, I will be doing a giveaway. One reader will receive a copy of Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story

This book, which I read shortly before launching this blog, radically changed the way I viewed my goals, my relationships, and even my walk with God. I feel like it's an appropriate choice for the giveaway.

So here are the rules.

1.Link to the giveaway via Facebook, Twitter, or a blog post on your own blog by Saturday, July 30th, 11:59 p.m. (Eastern).

2. In the comments below, a)link back to the Facebook/Twitter/blog post where you shared the link and b)share one thing that you love about blogging.

3. The winner (and receiver of the book) will be announced on August 6.

Spring Is In the Air

Lately, I've been a lazy blogger. This has to do, in part, with a schedule that has simply been filled to the brim. Part of it, too, has to do with the changing season. Today is the first day of spring. Seemingly overnight, the dead limbs have become covered with soft gray fuzz and the brown ground has transformed into green grass.

This spring, part of me is full of ideas and half-finished sentences and plans waiting to take shape. Part of me wants to blog about food and books and unplanned adventures.

 

But a corner of my soul wants to stop moving and talking and doing. Part of me desperately needs to just sit and take in the beauty and new life and warmth as I quietly watch the blossoms and trees and world unfold all around me.

Yesterday I lay on the grass, reading Annie Dillard and staring at the planes soaring far above me. And somewhere between awake and asleep, between the grass and the sky, between late afternoon and early evening, spring came to my soul too.

 

Questions and anxieties that built up in my mind and heart with the winter snows floated away with the spring breezes. Some questions were answered. Some anxieties were resolved. Some won't ever be. But maybe peace doesn't come through knowing as much as through accepting.

I can't fight the onward march of life and time any more than I can resist the rushing onslaught of spring. But really, who would want to? Sometimes working and striving and talking and blogging do less for the soul than just lying outside on the grass, breathing in the warm March air and welcoming the coming of spring.

Of the Writing of Books...

I have this mental picture of what the ideal journal (or rather, set of journals) must look like. Beautifully bound books, each filled at regular intervals to the brim with eloquent prose, penned in impeccable hand-writing.

I definitely do not meet this ideal.

My journals are kind of a combined smattering of variously bound books and notebooks, a few e-mail drafts, some scraps of loose paper, and some random Word documents buried in my computer archives.

My writing is anything but consistent. I might journal with diligent regularity for a few days or even weeks and then stop, for no apparent reason, for a month, a summer, or an entire year. This could mean something deep. I think it really just means I have a very short attention span.

Every now and then, I pen something resembling eloquent prose. Most of what I wrote is just boring. Some of it is absolute garbage that probably never should have made its way to the light of day. I'm pretty sure I need to have a journal-burning party one of these days.

Anybody who has known me longer than 20 minutes knows that impeccable hand-writing and I will never appear in the same sentence. Or even in the same book. I can barely read my own hand-writing in some of my entries. Isn't that why they invented computers?

Having confessed all of this, I'll add a positive note. When I took inventory of my possessions as I was moving out in January, I was pleasantly surprised at the number of journals I had created. In a little over five years, I've managed to fill a couple of small notebooks.
 

And when I glance back through the journals, while I shudder at a lot of the emotional immaturity and spastic nature of some of the contents, there is some good there as well.

It's humbling to see how immature and ungrounded I was at times when I felt firmly in control of myself.

It's gratifying to see tangible ways in which I have grown.

It's relieving to see places where weeks or months or years of mental or emotional tugging and straining ultimately gave way to peace.


It's satisfying to see that my recent efforts to make journaling more of a discipline and less of an emotional back-board have been productive. 

It's a little terrifying to know that in five or six years, I will probably view the present with the same kind of affectionate mortification with which I look at the last five or six years.

Do you journal? How? When? Why? Do you plan to keep them around forever? Share!

The Lost Line

This morning I woke up with one line of a song going around and around my head. It wouldn't leave. It drove me crazy for the first two hours of my day.

Then the line suddenly inspired an idea for a blog post. I thought, "Hey, I should write that down so that I don't forget it." But, since I was in a hurry, I didn't write it down.

Fast-forward one hour. In the car, driving to school, I reached over and switched the radio on. Suddenly, without warning, the line was gone. I couldn't, for the life of me, remember what it was.

Lesson #1: Write it down. Otherwise, you'll forget it.

Lesson #2: Sometimes creativity dies a hard death at the end of a long road of wasted toil and sweat. But sometimes creativity dies just because someone failed to write something down.

The Beginning

I've thought about writing a blog before. Too quickly, though, I would swamp my micro-managing self with questions like, "What would my title be?" "How often would I post?" and "What the heck would I talk about?" The last question was probably the most relevant, because nobody wastes their time reading about nothing. Well, sometimes I waste my time reading about nothing. But I would never publicly admit that.

Then something clicked. Somewhere between reading far too late one night and a desperate search for some reason to procrastinate still longer on my research project, I began to think about blogging again. And I couldn't shake it. So another blog was born. Not that you needed another reason to procrastinate online.