My Greatest Enemy

I made a pledge before the end of 2010 that I would blog every weekday for six months. As of this upcoming Monday, I'll have kept my word for a month.

Here's what I've learned so far-

1. My greatest enemy is doubt and it manifests as indecision. I can't tell you how many times I change my mind about what I'm going to blog about the following day. It's not rare at all for me to change topics a dozen times or more before I finally write the thing.

If I'm going to blog every week day, I can't spend hours deciding what I'm going to write about. I need to limit how long I allow myself to consider a topic. Once time is up, whatever I have, no matter how bad I think it will suck, it's what's going to be on the blog. If I can't defeat doubt, I can bypass the fucker.

2. My greatest enemy is time. I find it impossible to do a longer, more involved piece because I'm busy just trying to put together content every day. For the past few weeks, I've wanted to do a "The Whole Story" segment on CrossGen's Ruse, but I can't imagine finding the time to read an entire comic book series. In fact, the notion of making time to read anything that isn't mostly pictures seems laughable. Considering the challenge simply blogging every day has been, I don't know how I'm ever going to manage to write a novel, a short story, or anything else at the same time.

3. My greatest enemy is fear. I psych myself out. It is challenging to blog every day, work a full-time job that has nothing to do with my blogging, try to have a bare minimum of a social life, work on writing unrelated to the blog, etc. And you know what? I'm not going to be able to juggle it all at first. But I'm learning. I'm developing strategies. I'm compensating. And the best way for me to unravel those is to convince myself I don't have enough time before I even try. The reality is every time I have managed to simply sit down, shut up, and do the work, I've been amazed at how quickly I get done.

4. My greatest enemy is Gimli the Cat who - no matter how strongly I impress upon him the importance of my work - insists on jumping on my lap, planting his front paws on my chest, and licking my nose. His distractions are unbearable. I'm fairly certain he's working for al qaeda.

5. My greatest enemy is pride. I am so thoroughly unwilling to write something that will reveal I am not already a flawless, accomplished author, it endangers my ability to write anything at all.

6. My greatest enemy is laziness. As I bitch about time and fear and doubt, I could very well have twice the content I have on my blog if I wasn't always stopping to blow up shit on my XBox or, as evidenced by yesterday's post, spend hours watching a bunch of assholes run around a jungle and lie to each other about the ridiculous crap they find.

7. My greatest enemy is indifference. In the past few weeks I've dropped a lot more money on graphic novels than usual. I've read The Chill, Rat Catcher, Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, Hulk: World War Hulks, Hulk: Fall of the Hulks, Secret Six: Cats in the Cradle, Irredeemable Vols. 3 and 4, and Secret Avengers: Mission to Mars. Despite a significant need for subject matter, I've only reviewed one of them. I disliked some, liked others a little, but didn't care enough about most of them to feel like I have anything significant to say.

8. My greatest enemy is Tapping Tommy from Defenders #30.



I FUCKING HATE TAPPING TOMMY!!!!!!!