Blaugust successes and challenges At the very beginning of August, I made a hasty and last-minute decision to participate in Blaugust 2026 [1], an indieweb community blogging event that encourages writers to develop their writing habits by posting more frequently. It's an entirely voluntary, honor system, no-stakes situation. Just a way to for those who are already interested in this stuff to absorb a little extra motivation from being part of a community effort. In a recent post about answering song title questions, I touched on the topic of "parallel or together?", and how "both" is my favorite answer, when possible. I enjoy these community writing events because they give me a sense of parallel AND together. It's really fun to participate in a shared project with my digital peers, to engage in that mutual exchange of ideas, and to feel like we have a shared destination, if not a shared journey. Anyways, I digress. I went into Blaugust as a first-time participant, with no clear idea of what I'd expect from myself or be able to accomplish. I thought, okay: I'm already writing most days, and I'm writing a lot on the weekends. My digital scribbles don't always result in finished thoughts, but maybe I'll just apply myself a little bit more and see where this goes. In the beginning, it went great. I was initially very surprised to find how well I took to this challenge. Writing in the evenings for 30 to 60 minutes became a regular habit, and one I'd eventually come to cherish. In my "Slow Writing" post from a few weeks back, I mentioned that I found aspects of this transition to daily writing jarring, and the things I wrote in that piece still hold true. There is value in the process of writing, but for me it is not a particularly effective way of sorting out my thoughts. Nevertheless, I am nothing if not a creature of habit, and I did and still do find enjoyment in this time I reserved for myself to focus on a passion project of my choosing. Before I knew it, I was halfway through the month, and I'd posted every day. Looking back, this is where the challenge started to go a little bit wrong. I began feeling a certain self-imposed sense of pressure to "keep the streak going". After all, if I missed a day, everything I'd done up to that point would be a waste, right? As I write those words and read them back, it seems comical that I could possibly think this. And yet, perhaps missing a day could turn into a streak of not posting. Wouldn't want that to happen either. The tendency to engage in all or nothing thinking is a challenge I face in many other areas of my life, and I should have known that it would come up here too. As usual, I put unnecessary pressure on myself to do something that was meant to be fun, and it became a little bit less fun as a result. Mind you, I wasn't actively unhappy about it, but my focus by necessity shifted a bit from saying what I wanted to say when I felt like saying it to *producing output on a schedule*. No! Bad! That's not what I want this to be, and is one of the concerns I predicted in "Slow Writing". It's interesting how self-awareness can't always save us from our own bad habits. I recently gave advice to a 32-Bit cafe community member about finding satisfaction in this hobby by focusing on being process oriented instead of results oriented. Oops. Do as I say, not as I do. In retrospect, having a goal would have been okay if I had been more clear and more moderated with what I was hoping to accomplish. There's nothing wrong with having a reasonable plan, but in this case scope creep was the mind-killer. Or, I suppose I could have kept things ambiguous but made a point to "fail fast" by not posting during one of the first days of the month. In any case, I did succeed in posting daily for longer than I'd anticipated, and after taking a break for a few days to zoom out and think things over, I'm feeling energized and ready to start posting again. It's a long weekend for me (Labor Day [2], the best holiday, for my non-US readers) and after having woken up typically early on Saturday morning to draft this post, I'm feeling good about where I'm at and where I'm going. ~nullish Reply to this post via email [1] https://nerdgirlthoughts.game.blog/2026/07/15/blaugust-2026-is-coming/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day --- email blog index website