Oh man, I’m so glad nablopomo’s over as of today. I’m getting into crazy deadline month, so it’ll be good to not have to come up with something to say every day. But I want to quote a post Mrs. Kennedy (the inventor of nablopomo) wrote last week, because it was definitely the experience I had:

Alice recently pointed me toward the book Art and Fear, which I bought but haven’t read yet, so I’m going to paraphrase a section Alice told me about where the authors talked about a pottery class, I believe, that broke into two groups: one group would produce a piece every day, and the other group would produce a piece when they felt inspired to. At the end of the experiment it turned out that the group who had to turn out something every day, despite having made a fair amount of crap, also produced more good work than the group who only produced when they felt ready to. The point being that when you have to do something whether you feel like it or not, you may be more open to taking more risks and to easing your perfectionist tendencies, allowing more happy accidents to crop up.

She then concedes that blogging is definitely not captial-A Art, especially when you’re like me and are more critical than creative, but that it’s still better to do something every day than to not. It’s really pulled me out of the perfectionism that’s been slowing me down the last couple of months. So while I don’t plan on writing on my blog every day in December, I’m definitely taking the “just write something every day” work ethic and applying it to all the other work I have to do. And maybe I will actually get my thesis done.

So I guess what I’m saying is: thanks, nablopomo. Even though I did this last year and didn’t have any epiphanies, this has been surprisingly good for me.

*Sleater-Kinney - #1 Must Have