Imagine embarking on a weekly writing project. Let’s say your goal is to write three pieces a week with an average of 750 words per piece, totaling 2,250 words. First week, piece of cake. You’re on fire with inspiration. Second week, easy. Third week, easy. So, let’s skip ahead a bit. In the ninth week (having written twenty-four articles in the past two months), you find your creativity start to flag. In the thirteenth week (thirty-six articles in), you’re starting to have difficulty coming up with article ideas. In the seventeenth week (after forty-eight articles), you start to panic: What can I possibly write this week‽‽‽
To commit to regular writing on the internet is to submit to feeding an insatiable maw.
There is a reason that 90% of blogs are abandoned within the first six months.
(Actually, there are many reasons. Running out of ideas is certainly one of them. Some people lose interest. Some people have to attend to their lives and decide that their blog is no longer a life priority. Some people lose access to the internet. Etc. and etc.)
Given this, it is something of a minor miracle that Les Pages aux Folles is over twenty years old. There are a lot of reasons for the longevity of my little piece of satirical heaven on the internet; allow me to explain one of them.
I had been convinced to start the page in the spring, but didn’t actually launch it until September. Why? Because I spent the summer writing articles for it. By the time the web site launched, I had an inventory of thirty articles, many of which were not so topical that they couldn’t be held indefinitely. This meant that if I went a week with so little inspiration that I couldn’t write a single article, I could continue feeding the insatiable maw. In this way, I have been able to update the site for 1,087 consecutive weeks (and counting).
The inventory of unpublished articles has, as you can imagine, been a tremendous help to achieving this. For one thing, in this period I have been away from my computer for extended periods of time (for instance, traveling to science fiction conventions); this allowed me to continue publishing without a break. In the most extreme example, I had heart surgery, which I was warned would take a month to recover from; I was able to prepare four weeks of updates from the inventory. (As it happened, I was champing at the bit to write new material after about two and a half weeks, but I couldn’t know that.)
One side-effect of having this inventory that I was not expecting is that I have never panicked about feeding the insatiable maw. Having an extensive cushion (I now average about twenty articles in the unpublished inventory, which would give me roughly seven weeks of updates) allows me the luxury of not having to worry about being uninspired one week, or even several.
Whenever one is about to engage in a long-term project, preparation is the key.