Durham is growing its own crop of local businesses -- not just local artists and boutique eateries, but also a love of handmade crafts and the pleasure of both making and admiring objects that, as William Morris might say, are both useful and beautiful. The Horse & Buggy Press, a local letterpress, has some wonderful pictures for its Restored Radios exhibit, displaying American radios from the 1930s-50s restored by Asheboro resident Bob Gordon, age 81.

I know these radios were probably mass-manufactured, but damn -- just look at them and marvel at their decoration, their style, their solidity.

James Wood: “I deface nearly all my books, with both annotations in ink, and lots of dog-earing. I also write to-do lists in the endpapers, or telephone numbers, or names of people I must email. These latter often prove more interesting than any of my literary comments: years later, I stare at them, trying to work out who these people were.”

Inspired by Shannon's example, I decided to forge ahead and write M-F blog posts for 10 weeks. And rather remarkably, to me, I hit that goal without missing a day or calling for a do-over. Last Friday I posted my 50th entry.

What surprised me about the experience:

• I thought I would exhaust my list of 20 or so ideas. I now have about twice that many on my list, plus about 15 draft posts in various stages of completion. Which proves what I said in my first post: the more I write, the more I can write.
• The time between me getting an idea and then creating a decently readable post shrank. I experimented with ways to plan out long posts so they weren't so exhausting to write, though with mixed success.
• I can pretty much tell within about 20 minutes of writing whether I can finish a post in a sitting or whether it needs more time.
• I thought I would need fancy software but the WordPress setup has served me quite well and it gets better all the time. I still like starting some drafts in nvAlt, but I tend now to keep my drafts in the WP Dashboard.
• I tend to prefer the longform essays.
• Continuing to discover little idiosyncrasies in my style (such as my love of parenthetical asides or constantly adding "and" clauses to sentences) and occasionally surprising myself with a felicitously turned phrase or metaphor.

What pleased me:

• I restarted the blog in response to creative constipation; I had stuff backed up I wanted to write about but didn't know how. The regular writing unblocked whatever was jammed and the words and ideas simply gushed out for the last two months. (Here endeth the metaphor unsavourie.)
• Whenever I've felt blue, it's usually because I've not been exercising my creativity muscles. Shortly after restarting the blog, the dark cloud lifted and I began enjoying the process of planning, experimenting, and publishing. Writing is mood-altering!
• I like going back and reviewing the stuff I've written. I often forget what I've written about, and it's like finding lost treasure.
• I suppose because it was the last week of mandatory posting, I pushed out several posts that I had started in Spring 2011 but had never had enough reason to actually finish. The Davies and prospective memory posts had waited a long time to be given their due and each flew near the 2000-word mark. The satisfaction I felt in finally publishing those ideas and opinions -- really committing to them and then marking them as done -- felt so good.
• I really like being able to go back and fix a typo or rephrase some clumsy sentence. A blog post is never finished, only abandoned.
• Instead of my evenings being spent watching cat videos on YouTube or moving all the icons on my desktop 2cm to the left, I've spent them creating and producing things. What I always thought of as my distractible nature never bothered me while I wrote. And I felt much better about how I spent my time.

What I wish I could have done:

• I would have liked establishing a routine for writing every day at the same time. But since I typically wrote in the evenings, then perhaps that was my routine time.
• I wish I could have written shorter posts. The longer posts took a lot out of me and I sometimes felt kind of stunned the next day. I just like to blather on. I guess.
• I wish I could have found better graphics and maybe more multimedia. I like illustrations or pictures with blog posts and while Zemanta can find some interesting stuff, I sometimes just settled for what I could find in a hurry.

What I won't miss:

• Spending almost every Monday through Friday evening staring at a computer screen! There was one period where I successfully stayed one day ahead of schedule, and I remember one glorious patch where I had three short posts all lined up and scheduled for publishing through the end of the week. I was never able to repeat that.

What I still want to play with and figure out:

• I want to invest in the Thesis theme or something similar and more plugins. I would like to play around more with the site's look and feel. It's a rather bland looking site.
• My friend Mike Uhl, who writes two very focused blogs, continues to urge me to commit to a theme. Not for this site, which will remain a repository of jottings and fancies, but perhaps my next one.
• A Creative Commons notice and how to attach it to the end of every post.

A few remaining points:

• I will continue to write posts, but not to a schedule. I look forward to a break. One of the great things about this project is that I now have a new hobby. If I'm ever at loose ends and wonder whatsoever shall I do -- writing a blog post is the activity that will leap to mind.
• I have purposely not promoted the blog. I haven't advertised my posts on either my Twitter or Facebook accounts. This blog has been my private lab where I could try things out, play around, and generally make lots of pots while letting the process work its magic on me. When I start a more focused blog, it will be to support my side-business and then I will be more interested in the social media side.
• It's not the goal that's important, after all, it's who you have to become to achieve the goal. In the past 10 weeks, I've become someone who spends his free time writing, getting better at writing, and sharing what he knows (or thinks he knows). And it's been great.

Hat tip to Southern Folklife Collection’s Facebook feed

See also these Orange Crate Art posts:

• Harvey Pekar on life and death
• Good advice from Harvey Pekar

(originally posted 2012-10-08, updated for micro.blog)