Mostly for my own sake, I want to bring closure to my Lenten 40 Daze series, even though it is now the third week of Easter. This allows me to increase my tally of posts for the series, see what I did there? Also I’ve never believed time to be linear, so yep, that explains a lot about me.

What I Learned Over My Lenten Vacation Is…

It takes a whopping ton of mental energy to execute all the tasks that go into making a blog post public. No longer difficult, though, is finding the inspiration.  I’ve finally reached a non-rhythm in life where I can make the writing happen any day, any time, thanks to Evernote on my phone and a practice of capturing ideas. I never ever sit down to a blank page. Sometimes I have to decipher what the heck autocorrect thought I was trying to type as I pretended not to be on my phone at a traffic light, or as I DIC-TA-TED AN-GRI-LY WITH EX-A-GGER-A-TION at Siri while piloting the stroller over massive sidewalk potholes. But capturing, as a practice, is finally ingrained. It has only taken a decade – thanks to David Allen of Getting Things Done for starting me off on it years ago, and to Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal method for reminding me more recently that ideas have to be put somewhere sensible so you can find them again.*

Today, just for funsies, let’s look at the steps it takes to post for the world (aka my mom – hi mom!) to read on this blog:

  1. Carve out of my toddler-chaotic day a quiet time – ha! ha ha! This is a job unto itself that often requires the decision to forfeit any preparation for dinner thereby gambling on having a full-family hangry meltdown by 6 pm. We eat a lot of pancakes.
  2. Set up a Goldilocks space for writing with computer and journal (not too cold, not too hot, not too close to distractions…) In this winter this usually requires a heating pad for the ol’ back and a mug of hot beverage and a lap blanket and where the heck did the baby drag my fingerless gloves that were RIGHT HERE yesterday…
  3. Log into Evernote…tick tock tick tock. My browser’s pretty slow these days.
  4. Pick the right prompt fragment for today’s mood and mindset from all my captured notes.
  5. Write the first draft of the darn thing, usually to about 80%.
  6. Edit and finish the writing – this is usually the work of another day/session – which gets me to about 95%.
  7. Do any related internet research and get totally distracted, but also sometimes come away with material for future prompts. Attempt to capture those ideas while knowing I must return my focus to the current post.
  8. Attempt to log in to WordPress.
  9. Wait a long time for WordPress/LastPass to load the insanely secure password my husband set up to protect these precious, PRECIOUS blog posts that no one is reading (I love you, The Hubs.)
  10. Copy and paste the writing into WordPress.
  11. See and read it in a new layout which inspires more editing, usually now hacking away at superfluous words for the sake of brevity.
  12. Look at the post in Preview mode and remember that, oops, you can’t copy and paste from Evernote because of hidden formatting which causes all the line spacing to be nonexistent (&nbsp $#!+)** so then I must reformat the text from the HTML view (you’d think after 20+ posts I would remember to just Paste And Match Style into TextEdit first but noooooooo.)
  13. Format any links and then most likely get distracted on the Internet finding the info I needed for the links. There are fascinating nature videos on the Internet, FYI.
  14. Decide on the best short quote to pull out of the piece for the teaser.
  15. Tag all subjects in the post. This involves decision making. Decisions are hard.
  16. Pick an image file from my folder of scanned children’s artwork.
  17. Format the stupid picture, oh how I detest WordPress’ management of visual media.
  18. Keep going back and forth from Preview mode (waiting for it to loooooooooad) to see if the photo is placed the way I want it or not, and then recropping it over and over, rinse and repeat.
  19. Decide to finally hit Publish, oh that glorious button.
  20. Remember that I forgot to add the line at the bottom and the phrase “Post #__ of 40 Daze: A Lenten Writing Practice”.
  21. Open a new tab to look up on my own website which # of the series this one actually is.
  22. Update.
  23. Then, if I’m really feeling like losing a full hour of my time, I will consider posting the link on Facebook, which means that in the process I will catch up on several people’s personal lives, be incensed by at least one friend’s political views, and open in separate tabs three or four intriguing articles to read later. Then also I have to figure out what to say on my Facebook wall (is it still called a wall?) that might get people to click on the link to my blog, and then for the life of me I cannot figure out why some posts show up with the preview image and some show up only as text.

Needless to say, this process did not happen each day of Lent. It was impossible. What seems to work best is to gauge my energy and mindset per session and break the tasks into groups. When I had creative energy but not much time, I would crash my way through writing the drafts of several prompts. When I had time but not much energy or inspiration, I would begin the formatting of posts within WordPress. Some days I was in a flow state and could write-format-publish fluidly, but it was rare.

It was the artwork set me back most, until I discovered a brilliant work-around. I found I was reluctant to put up a post unadorned, but I really detested the process of taking a photo, or trying to find the photo that I thought I took a few days ago, sometimes finding it to discover that it was no longer relevant or I didn’t like it. For a while I thought I could DRAW SOMETHING BY HAND for every post, but then I realized I was completely delusional, though it’s a great goal to aspire to a little later in life. One day I was sorrowfully shoveling my way through piles of Junior’s artwork wondering how to figure out what to hang, keep, or toss, and when I would possibly want to use any of my precious child-free time to make those decisions, when it occurred to me that amorphous smears of color would perfectly represent my rather focus-less writing. But it was still too many decisions to make on the spot per post, so I had to take non-writing time to scan batches, that way the decision was quick and easy from a limited number of options: Here’s an angry red blob, here’s something that could be construed as either a tree or pickle relish, etc.

Writing about the process of the process is helping me see the points at which productivity breaks down, and perhaps some ways to protect and cultivate actual writing time from time that is just formatting. As always, I am learning from my tenuous relationship with technology that it is a tool with great power that is mostly able to suck me dry of my time. But if I didn’t have this blog I’d be filling random notebooks and scrap pieces of paper with incomplete thoughts, losing them under my bed to be found months later with the dust bunnies, decapitated Lego men, and two dozen foam earplugs that the baby apparently dropped one by one behind the headboard. At least he didn’t eat them. So the blog gives me a skeleton for organization, and the occasional friend-reader (aka: my mom) who tells me they are reading reminds me that at some point I’d like to have an audience, but the writing work is still the main thing. The capture, the crafting, the honing, the decision to cut off the editing, and the release…these things are the process of writing. These are the things changing me. The practice is not making perfect, like I was often told throughout my classical music education. But the practice makes presence, and presence is what allows inspiration to grow even during arid seasons of life.

So 40 Daze: A Lenten Writing Practice, despite its lack of focus and general disorganization, has morphed into what we could call a Life Writing Practice.

He is risen, indeed.  Alleluia.

* As an aside, who can recommend to me an amazing productivity book or method written by a woman or a person of color? I’m thankful for creative and organized white men but boy (pun!) is it a monochromatic field of authors.
** Can’t take credit for $#!+ – thanks to Mel Bochner’s velvet prints at the 2018 Carnegie International

Post #26 of 40 Daze: A Lenten Writing Practice.