So comes to an end the two weeks of my daily blogging experiment. Time to examine the results.

First of all, the critical question: will I continue blogging daily? No. The one risk I was most worried about is that it would get in the way of my fiction writing, and while that didn’t happen as much as I feared, it did happen more than I find acceptable. Were I like John Scalzi, a full-time writer of one type or another (mostly fiction now, though that wasn’t always the case for him), I could comfortably blog each day without it getting in the way of the work. (In fact, I often find different types of writing help.) But that’s not where I am right now. My schedule is just too much of a mess. Daily blogging got in the way more than I wanted, so it’s out.

That doesn’t mean the experiment was useless. One of my other stated goals was to get past the easy topics and delve deeper, to get better at creating a personal connection, and that definitely happened. With only a day worth of my life to mine for content, I had to get more personal, and I like some of the posts that resulted: it’s criminal that I never wrote of my daily notecards before, I explored myself when talking about falling behind, I revealed something I wouldn’t have otherwise when talking about Frozen, and I never would have written 25 hours a week if I hadn’t been under a deadline. Blogging daily helped me become more comfortable with talking about the parts of my life that I consider private (though once again, not too private—oversharing is obnoxious), which is something I’ll take with me going forward.

Another difficulty I had was that I kept found myself not wanting to publish certain posts because I didn’t want to “pigeonhole” them as a daily. If I thought a post had evergreen potential, I wanted it to be a normal post, so future readers wouldn’t be confused with the “Daily #” in the title—but with a daily post I still had to do, and them eating into my fiction time as is, I never wanted to publish two posts. That’s why some of the politics posts I’ve been alluding to (specifically the ones on structural reforms I’m going to start putting money behind) haven’t come out yet. Of course, had I kept up with the dailies I could have axed the “Daily #” from the titles, though that would forfeit the explicit sense of continuity. Still, not an insurmountable problem.

More cogent is that I believe truly great content ought to take time, and that I don’t want two places with time-sensitive content, since I plan to return to weekly blogging at RandomC next season. If I was willing to spend 12+ hours to put out a great piece of content each day (ala Casey Neistat’s vlog), that’d be fine—but I don’t have the time or money for that. Not for blogging, at least.

The good news is that I wrote a LOT of extra posts covering topics I didn’t feel were appropriate for dailies, so I’ll have that bounty to harvest for some time to come.

So, where do I go from here? What I think I’m going to do is add a line to my daily notecards, right before my evening habs, that says “SWGEE post?” (SWGEE, in all caps, is my shorthand for a blog post; it used to be SOL, for Stilts Out Loud, when that’s what this site was called. SWGee, without the e’s capitalized, is what I use for my short signature/initials. It’s only two more letters to go from initials to signiture, might as well add ’em, right?)

Sorry, digression. So what I think I’ll do is make it a habit of sitting down and thinking about whether there’s anything I want to blog about each night. That way, if I get a good idea, I can write about it. If not, no biggie. And maybe sometimes I’ll still force myself to go deeper, to get past the easy topics to the ones beneath, but that’s a consideration for future Stephen. Mostly it’s just about being present and deliberate, about purposefully thinking about whether there’s anything I want to write about rather than letting my site go fallow for weeks on end before I remember it exists. Making it a part of my life, basically, rather than an occasional digression.

All this means that, for now, I won’t be blogging as often as I have been, but maybe more than I used to. As long as it doesn’t get in the way of the books. That’s still, and always will be, priority number one.