If I'm not writing blogs, what am I writing?
Among the zero drafts I've written since the winter solstice--all written, let's remember, explicitly for eventual publication--there are many thousands of words that I haven't touched for pieces here. Some of those reasons are thematic (just how much am I ready to bare my soul?) but many are formal, and honestly, I think the latter is more critical. (After all, nothing in my rules said, "Hey, keep all your writings to topics x, y and z.") Those unused pieces have tended to be in-depth explorations of complicated forces in my life, and they follow a certain linearity of logic that isn't easily carved down to the two-hundred- to five-hundred-word length piece that my intuition is generally guiding me to publish here on Free Refills.
I think it's clear now that there are some limitations to the experiment as I have conducted it so far. The rules I'm operating under are not leading me in the right direction. The daily struggle to publish is getting worse, not better. That's a clear sign that I'm not on the right path. My daily zero-drafting is guiding me neither to the long-form writing that certain topics require, nor at all comfortably toward the type of piece that feels right to publish here. My zero-drafting technique has me kind of splitting the difference. And I see now that has to change.