My long weekend is ending. I am back home, sitting on my own couch. I’ll be in bed in an hour or so, which means it’s time to reflect on my progress.
There’s not a lot to report. No sooner had I saved yesterday’s blog post than the power at my in-laws’ went out. I had no internet, and only the scant screen time that the battery on my 10-year-old laptop could provide. On top of that, what I did have was plans. R and I took the Goblin downtown, since she wanted to see the Space Needle, and then while she napped back in the dark house, R and I went to a performance of Frida….A Self-Portrait with my mother-in-law.
We returned mid-afternoon, but the power still wasn’t back, and it wouldn’t return until the hours before dawn this morning. By then, the great machinery of travel was in motion: resting, waking early, packing up, and catching the train home, followed by unpacking and settling in.
All that is to say, sitting down on my couch now, an hour before bed on Monday, is the first chance I’ve really had since Saturday evening to do any tinkering.
So I don’t have a bare-bones Eleventy skeleton, not yet. Objective failed! But I think I know how I’ll get there. Like I wrote yesterday, I’ll be working through the Learn Eleventy course again, this time adapting the exercises to my own project. I’ll also be referencing the work of other IndieWebbers who use 11ty, learning how they solve common problems and letting their efforts jump-start my own. I’m thinking I’ll join 32-Bit Café, too, to be more closely connected to other people interested in and doing this kind of creative work.
A decade ago, I challenged myself to make 25 blog posts in a month. I only reached 19. Reflecting at the end of the endeavor, I wrote:
No, I didn’t meet the goal I set for myself. But I wrote 19 posts, which is more than a post every two days. Blogathon 2014 drew nearly 700 visits to my site, and almost 500 new users. Most importantly for me, I wrote. I blogged and blogged and blogged, a process that made my blog feel more like my own than anything I’ve done in years.
At the end of the day, I don’t think the goal really was to write 25 posts. I mean, that’s what I said, but my motivation was slightly different. I wanted to write, first and foremost, and hoped that in doing so, I would shake off my reluctance to share things here. By that metric, Blogathon 2014 was a smashing success. The process of starting a new draft seems remarkably natural to me now–I don’t sit here wondering if what I want to write is worth sharing. It’s my blog. If I want to say it here, I can.
I have less to show for this weekend’s push than I did my 2014 blogathon, but I find some familiarity and comfort in those words. This weekend, I broke through the rusty stasis that had been paralyzing me and kept sustained focus on a task that means a lot to me. I know where I’m going next. That’s what I’ll be taking with me.
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