Pursuant to the idea of making myself write every day, I'm going to try and write at least a paragraph here every single day. This will be random commentary about the world, without limits. It could be about politics or religion or sex. It's somewhat more likely to be about movies, television, video games, or just random crap I read on the internet. The point is less to write a coherent narrative or establish a personal philosophy as it is to simply reinforce the habit of writing every day.
Rather than long posts made once every couple of weeks as I did back on my LiveJournal, I anticipate this will be shorter, more stream of consciousness type affairs. In other words, whatever happens to be on my mind at the time.
Right now, I'm thinking about the link that Neil Gaiman put on his Twitter to Seth Godin's blog which advocates what I'm doing here: writing every day. So I figure I'd give it a try.
What do I have to lose? A few minutes every day, some self-esteem if I can't keep it up. Totally worth the gamble.
So for this introductory post I thought I'd share something I've learned from observational data. If you want to write, get enough sleep!
How much "enough" is varies from person to person, of course. And there are probably outliers who only do their best work hung over and strung out after being awake for thirty six hours or some such nonsense, but in my personal experience, the difference between how much I can get done on six hours of sleep versus eight hours is immense. As I understand it, the guys who wrote Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength say that a person's willpower is affected by the amount of glucose in that person's bloodstream at any given time. I don't have the science to know whether getting more sleep versus less sleep affects glucose, I just know that it's easier to write on more sleep.
So that's Jon's Advice for Writers #1: Get enough sleep!
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