Navel gazing: WTF am I doing?

Okay, so it's after  11:00 1 a.m. and I am posting.  Sue me.

One of the things I am trying to wrap my head around is the extent to which what I do here is art, or a preparation for art, or a procrastination or avoidance of art.  I can't decide.

Elizabeth Bear has very good advice for those who would write a novel.  The first rule?  Butt-in-chair.  You have to write everyday.  I have not been doing that.  I have been closer to doing that this year in any year previously.

You have to see yourself as an artist.  I don't.

I am a blogger.  Is that an art?  The medium is closest to being an essayist, except that my essays are mostly very personal and probably of limited use to anyone other than myself.

Is this in fact a preparation for being a Writer with a capital W, or does it make me a writer in and of itself? I am not a novelist -- and if I really think about it, I have no interest in being a novelist.  But I do have an interest in writing nonfiction. So I need to... write.  And research.  And I am thinking that all of the time I spend on writing for this blog  takes away from the time I need to spend, you know, researching and writing in a format that will get me published someday.

Except... I like this.  No, I crave this.  Yes, there are far too many days when I let stupid things like a lack of a convenient computer get in the way.  And there are days when I slack off, and don't write because I don't think I have anything to say.  But I do write -- this year, for every month past June, save August,  I have had at least 20 posts.   A lot of those posts were short, but quite a number of them were substantive.  Even though there has been a lot of down time simply due to lack of convenient computer access.  (I keep telling myself that if I were a real writer, I would ignore and overcome that.)

So what is this?  Does anyone other than me care?  I clearly write for myself here.  If I cared what size my audience was -- or at least to any real extent, since I do care some and am happy when I know people are reading -- I would have stopped bothering with this a long time ago.  Because, let's face it, when your number of hits per day averages in the single digits (recognizing, of course, that that does not take into account people who read via Google reader or through the RSS feed) you have a negligible footprint on the web.

I will keep on thinking about these things.  More importantly, I will keep writing -- hopefully more consistently, hopefully about more general things.  I have spent the year in self-reflection; it is time to move beyond that.

In the meantime, there are several pieces I want to bookmark:

Elizabeth Bear's advice to would-be writers

Eric's rules for making art

Kevin Smith's "Be a filmmaker"