A Post About Not Blogging....

Just curious if fellow bloggers working on major writing/research projects find any of this familiar....

I keep promising myself that I'll blog more regularly. Sometimes I make that promise more publicly via a post. But, throughout the last year and a half, My Main Job aka The Dissertation has kept me from blogging with any kind of regularity that might be remotely referred to as some kind of posting frequency. Unfortunately, not always because I'm so busy being productive and writing out fascinating ideas one page after the other but mostly because I don't want to put any steam in any kind of writing exercise lest it take energy away from The Main Job which sometimes isn't easy to keep plodding along at.

I could of course start posting sections of dissertation chapters completed at a particular time but I feel protective towards the (quasi?) anonymity I have. I've also had frustrating experiences in the last 5 years with having had my work plagiarized to varying degrees so the Internet doesn't seem like a space where I want to post my chapters anytime soon unless of course The Dissertation becomes The Book. Given that I started this blog with the intention of talking about intellectual debates I grapple with and that most of my thinking has been very dissertation-focused we get back to the anonymity and plagiarism hang-ups I have. I could always post about my triumphs, trials, and tribulations re: dissertating - that takes the blog in a slightly different direction which is where I've been at with my last few posts but since I've been stuck working on my methodology chapter for what might seem longer than necessary it wasn't a particularly thrilling prospect to post about that.

So in other words, I don't blog because I don't have anything to blog about - or, mostly, because blogging is akin to writing and if I am going to write I should really channel all of that effort into The Dissertation.

Or maybe, just maybe, I could think of this as practice for writing multiple things simultaneously and staying on a schedule in which I write down what I think (how else will I evolve as a scholar?) which is probably the way life will be when I find my Shiny-New-Main-Job (touchwood, from this blog to the ears of search committees, Inshallah, God willing - what am I missing here in terms of rituals?).

I want to blog more frequently, I really do. Because it's one way that I can allow myself to write about things other than the dissertation and maybe keep my brain/mind happy and stimulated. I also like the idea that blogging is a way to put one's ideas out there for anyone with an Internet connection to see. Even more so, it's a space in which I'm forced to press thoughts I otherwise might not....something which certain classes I took throughout my college career especially a core seminar I took with my now-Dissertation-Chair always provided but now that I'm ABD and working long-distance from my institution I don't quite have regular access to. Plus it'll force me to get into the habit of getting things written without holding myself back from finishing because it isn't p-e-r-f-e-c-t!

Hmm guess I should get over this whole not-blogging-regularly deal? Maybe I'll get back into it now, maybe I'll end up waiting till the first complete draft of the entire dissertation is submitted to all committee members - an event that is imminent. We'll see - I do know that I started blogging because I enjoyed it and I want to make more time for it starting today.