There are, in the history of this blog, several huge holes. Several huge periods of time exist over the past 7+ years during which I gone weeks or months without a post. I posted once in 2009 after my wedding. I posted once in 2014; a post that remains one of my top posts ever, traffic-wise.

For quite some time, I considered my inconsistency as a blogger a direct function of my inconsistency as a writer, but as I look through my Evernote pile, I find literally hundreds of notes, partial posts, and complete posts that I just never got around to editing and posting. I write constantly, I post infrequently.

When I was blogging for U of M Dearborn, one of the things in which I found a tremendous amount of value was that I was putting up a minimum of one post each week. I didn’t have a chance to be precious with my words or excessive in my editing—I was working full time, raising two kids, and going to school full time—my writing only had time to get to “good enough” before I was forced to send it out into the world.

That is a thing that I think I’ve been lacking here. Some sense of finality, or at least some sense of deadline.

So that is something that I have started; an attempt at consistency forcing more and better writing. I have been slowly moving my partial notes, ideas, and unedited work over to this blog. Each week I schedule one of them to be auto-posted at 11:00am ET on Wednesday. I now have a timer ticking away. Either I finish up my post, or it gets posted incomplete. Any editing that I can fit in before it posts is all of the editing I get. I am allowed to unschedule only in the event that I have completed a different piece and have posted it by that time instead. In this way, I’ve managed at least a post per week since I started my new process in mid-August.

Will I keep it up? Who knows. So far, I have the luxury of a pretty sizable backlog of evergreen topics that I’ve already partially written from which to choose each week. Perhaps when I’ve caught up to my backlog this will all come crashing down. Perhaps by that time, though, I’ll have learned that nothing bad happens when what I post isn’t “perfect.”

In the interim, enjoy my marginally polished thoughts.