# Day 15 of Daily Writing


This is post 15 of my unannounced, self-imposed month of daily writing. I’ve
been making soft promises to myself and others to write more for... years. I was
inspired by a few of the folks who wrote daily last month for
[Inkhaven](https://www.inkhaven.blog/), and so decided to do my own super
unofficial version of that.

It’s been fun so far! And by “fun” I mean it’s been a rewarding challenge. :)

Some thoughts:

-   Sitting down to “do writing” is a lot easier if you’ve scratched down some
    notes, or started on an outline of a post already. I’ve been using a
    mishmash of [iA Writer](https://ia.net/writer),
    [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/), and [Drafts](https://getdrafts.com/) to
    outline and ideate.
-   **Writing for a deadline is helpful.** There have been a couple posts where
    in the past, I would have endlessly tweaked and wordsmithed before
    publishing. When the forcing function is “I want to finish this so I can go
    to bed”, suddenly editing decisions become easier. Similarly, writing
    _daily_ helps me stay in the rhythm of writing and build up “muscle memory”.
    Only writing when I feel “inspired” is a recipe for not writing much.
-   Writing is mentally taxing, but “doable” on low mental energy. Ideating is a
    more enjoyable / open activity, but is _not_ doable with low mental energy.
-   **Posting more means I am less precious about each post.** I think this is
    good. Having variance in article quality is healthy. For my preferences, a
    mixture of high-effort and mid-effort posts seems like a good mix. Only
    posting high-effort content is less rewarding, ultimately, since most of my
    more “popular” posts are my mid-effort ones, but most of the posts that I’m
    “most glad I’ve written” are the high-effort ones. Each of these is
    rewarding in its own way.
-   **High-effort posts, unsurprisingly, take a lot of time.** Both book reviews
    I’ve posted this month were done on weekends; this isn’t an accident, though
    it wasn’t intentionally planned.
-   **Running is a good time for ideation.** I already knew this, but when I’m
    in the mode of “it would be nice to have things to write about”, it’s nice
    to know that I have an activity that readily fosters idea generation.
-   Writing more made me tidy house a bit, digitally. I’ve been tweaking on the
    margins with my personal site as I now look at it more frequently. I
    improved the [blog archive page](/blog/archive/), added a markdown output to
    each post for LLMs[^1], improved my image loading performance, and so on.
    This sort of [digital garden](https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history)
    tending feels wholesome.

What’s been working:

-   Using iA Writer has been legitimately delightful, even though I likely use
    <5% of its full feature set.
-   Allowing myself to post articles that I think are past the 80% quality line
    has made me feel much freer to “just write more”. Move on to the next idea.

What’s NOT been working:

-   I still want to write on some less directly technical topics (e.g.
    psychology, philosophy, etc.), and have been finding it somewhat tricky to
    find an “in” there. I think I’ll just need to accept that those posts will
    be intentionally not in my normal lane and bite that bullet.
-   Writing pieces that take more than one sitting is hard in this mode. I
    generally ideate in the morning and write in the evening, and “need” to get
    a post out by the evening. I tend to have a fairly single-track mind for
    writing, and so parallelism is hard. Which means sequentially writing one
    post per day. Which means, mostly, writing them in one sitting -- and that
    places a (likely constructive) limit on how much effort I can put into any
    individual post.

Beyond the mechanics, writing more intentionally has also made me think about my
projected online identity. My blog has always held a bit of a weird niche in my
mind -- it’s part public journal, part “performative display of competence”,
part curiosity log. I primarily write on technical topics, but I wouldn’t call
this a “tech blog”. Sometimes my articles get picked up HackerNews; sometimes my
coworkers read my blog, or inspire a post. Sometimes I’m writing just because I
want something to exist, for having thought of a connection between some ideas
that I find interesting. Upon reflection, my ideal reader is the person who
resonates with many of the same topics that I’m interested in, has my blog as
one of many in an RSS reader, and (if the stars align) gets a little bit of joy
or curiosity when clicking on a new piece of my writing.

In any case, I have the explicit awareness while doing this month-long writing
exercise that this is _not_ maintainable as a daily practice. Part of this
effort is to shake out all the cobwebs of ideas that I’ve had on my “to write”
list for far too long. The
[Antimemetics](/blog/2025/12/06/Book-Review-Antimemetics/) review was one, but
there’s one or two other personally important topics that I’d like to get in
writing before the month is over. The hope, though, is that I find some pieces
of this experience that I enjoy enough or am able to integrate well enough to
exit this with a “more frequent than quarterly” writing routine.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate it. (And do drop an email if you ever feel
inclined, I enjoy hearing from folks!)

[^1]:
    Add `/index.md` as a suffix to any blog url to get the markdown version of
    it.