I’m going to try something ridiculous.

I’ve been wanting for a while to blog more. No surprise. I think just about every amateur blogger regularly looks at their front page and thinks, “Damn, I should blog more.” I’ve said it myself, numerous times. But this time, I’m going to do something about it, and that something is a blogathon.

Here’s my goal: between 12:00 am (my time) on August 1st, 2014, and 11:59 pm on August 31st, I will write and publish 25 new posts here on the blog. That’s it. No rules about content or length—these could be 25 posts about anything (and I fully expect there to be some oddballs in there). But 25 posts.

It’s a little intimidating. 25 is a big number—that means if I stick to a pattern of one post a day, I’ll have less than one week of wiggle room. In fact, when I started writing this post, I intended to set my sights on 20, because it seemed easier and totally doable. Then I realized this was one of those situations where I could sit back and be comfortable, or really push myself into scary territory. I don’t get those very often, so I figured I probably owed it to myself to do the scary thing.

If you want to help out, send me a question or a prompt! I initially asked for questions on Facebook, expecting personal things like “What’s a time you were horribly, embarrassingly wrong?” or “How do you feel about mortality?” or “What do you want to do with your life?” Instead, I got some really deep philosophical questions. Those are rad too, I suppose. Whatever floats your boat. At any rate, go to that link and submit your questions for me, and I may or may not answer them.

The last time I tried something even vaguely like this was NaNoWriMo 2013, when I set off trying to write a 50,000-word novel and never made it past 5,437 words. I soon found that I had too much going on in my life to prioritize writing 1,667 words a day, especially since I write at a snail’s pace. Will that happen with this goal? Will trying to write 6-7 posts a week overwhelm me and burn me out?

I sure hope not, but there’s really only one way to find out.


Shiba photograph by Atsuko Sato.