To illustrate, let me tell you what has happened with this blog. As you know, if you’ve been reading, my husband and I have been in the throes of making a big decision. We’ve been a little busy. So it has been harder than usual to find time to write. Also, my brain has been occupied with gnawing on the various pieces of this decision, and not with the usual random assortment of thoughts that I like to share with you. Some of the issues at play in our decision-making are probably of broader interest, but after a while I figured you’d get tired of hearing about my angst. (After a while, I got tired of it myself.) And because the decision has involved some delicate negotiations, I have not felt free to share all of my musings with the big wide world.

The upshot of all of this is that I stopped writing. And immediately started feeling guilty. (I have literally had “blog” on my to-do list for weeks now.) The longer I waited, the worse I felt, until I didn’t even want to think about blogging because it instantly conjured up all these feelings of failure and regret and frustration. Sitting down to write a post stopped being fun, and started to feel like this miserable, looming chore.

But the truth is, of course, that writing a post is as simple and pleasant as it has always been—as I remembered the instant I sat down at the keyboard just now. The hard part was getting over the emotional barrier that I created when I lost my rhythm.

Writer’s block is a well-known phenomenon, but I notice this pattern in just about every arena of my life. I miss a call from a friend I haven’t talked with in a while, and for whatever reason, don’t return the call right away. And then I spend weeks with “call friend” on my mental list, but feel increasingly sheepish about the delay, and decreasingly likely to just pick up the phone. Or I get in a good exercise routine, but then miss a few days, and a few more, and pretty soon I have to start all over again, convincing myself that I really am the kind of person who exercises and that I should just lace up my shoes and go.

In every instance, resuming the lost routine is much easier in practice than it is in my imagination. In fact, it is usually instantly satisfying because it removes the whole mess of guilt I’ve been carrying around. The frustrating part is that although I am fully aware of this pattern, and recognize it as it is happening, I still succumb to it more often than I would care to admit.

What do you do when you lose your stride…in your work, your hobbies, your relationships? Any tricks for getting back in the saddle more gracefully?

I recognize that this is Hollywood, but what a tale–ordinary girl has a good idea, starts a blog, writes for a while, and is suddenly inundated with calls from big reporters and offers of book deals. Her life is later made into a blockbuster movie with famous actors.

The key, of course, is the idea. (And also the cooking, I suppose.) Julie Powell’s year-long project of tackling all 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in her tiny apartment kitchen was surely a gimmick and a stunt, as it has disparagingly been called. But it was a good one.

My favorite description is one by food writer Michael Pollan writing for the New York Times. He describes Powell landing on her winning idea while “casting about for a blog conceit.” Though conceit has some less-than-savory connotations, I don’t actually think he’s being critical. According to Merriam-Webster Online, a conceit can be “a fanciful idea” or an “elaborate or strained metaphor,” but it can also mean “an organizing theme or concept.” All three definitions are applicable here.

So as other people have been dusting off their Julia Child cookbooks and no doubt boosting butter sales nationwide, I have been wondering: Does a blog need a conceit? Does mine have one?

I know some of the things that make a blog compelling: snappy writing, timely topics, an endearing author. (I will leave it up to you, dear readers, to decide whether this blog meets those criteria.) But I wonder whether that is enough. If I put some thoughts up here a couple of times a week about whatever is rattling around in my brain, will that draw people in and keep them reading? (Forget about a book deal.) If not, what would?

I think a blog conceit might be kind of fun, but I am still in the “casting about” stage. If I happen to hook a good one, you’ll be the first to know.

I know you all have blogs you can’t live without. Bring on the barrage of suggestions!

Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist

Career advice, especially about work in the new millennium. Also a lot about her own crazy career, her kids, and her sex life.  I’m a little addicted to this blog right now, but I feel okay about it because so are 30,000 other people.

Domestic Disturbances

Judith Warner’s weekly blog for the New York Times. She wrote Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, which I read during pregnancy while others were poring over baby name books, and her blog riffs on all the same themes. In a glamorous alternate version of my life I think I would be her.

Writer Mama

Author (and mama) Christina Katz and lots of guest bloggers offer down-to-earth tips to get you off your butt and building a freelance career.

Seth Godin’s Blog

Reading this big-time marketing blog makes me feel much more business-savvy and tech-savvy and generally cool that I actually am. I also love how short and meaty his posts are.

Water Words That Work

Not just for enviros. This blog is a round-up of good, bad, and ugly attempts at environmental marketing and communication. It’s a great touchstone for all of us whose work is persuasion, regardless of the issue.

Chicken Lit

This is my friend Karen Bassler’s blog about all kinds of random stuff. (Her tagline is “What’s Collected in My Feather Duster”) Like Karen, it’s funny and feisty, and it inspires me.

So I want to let you know about a very cool tool that may be new to you. See that little orange button in the top right corner of the screen? Right next to “Get the Tinkering RSS Feed”? If you click on it you will have all kinds of options for seeing new content on this blog without having to remember to visit this site.

It will come to you via a news reader–a tool that aggregates web info that you want to track and organizes it for you. Google has one. There are lots of other options too. Watch this short and handy video about RSS to learn how readers work.

Subscribing to this  blog with a reader is good for you, because it’s one less thing to remember, and you won’t risk missing the best post ever. And it’s good for me, because you’re much more likely to be a regular reader if all my scintillating new posts automatically show up in front of you.

Thanks for following, and happy reading!

All of which would lead you to believe that the lack of a blog is not really a pressing issue in my life. (And if you had any doubt, you could check out all the reasons why starting a blog is an ill-advised venture for anyone.)

But the thing is that I’m a writer. I write well. I write professionally, a little bit. And most of all, I enjoy writing. Since I’ve begun to dip my tentative little toes into the freelance writing world, people have been telling me I need a blog. They base this claim on two main arguments:

1) It will raise my profile. Debatable, I say. First, people would have to find me. Second, they would have to be impressed enough to want to learn more about me, and then to hire me to write stuff for them. Seems like kind of a long shot.

2) It will be good practice. This one is much harder to argue with. Though I’m calling myself a freelance writer these days, and have a business card to prove it, clients are not exactly knocking down the door. Sometimes writing days involve a lot of staring at the screen and waiting for projects to materialize. Might as well spend that time writing, I figure. The discipline of knocking words together on a regular basis will be good for me, and the pressure to post regularly will help me overcome one of my biggest writer-fears: running out of ideas.

On the strength of these reasons, I got to the point of deciding, “Yeah, well… probably a good idea. Something to think about in the future.” And that, likely, is where I would have remained indefinitely if I had not stumbled across Penelope Trunk’s Guide to Blogging. There was a flyer up at my office about a talk she gave recently, and I checked out her website on my lunch break. There’s a lot of interesting stuff up there–for instance, the answer to how much money you need to be happy. But the thing that caught my eye was the guide to blogging–particularly these pearls:

Blogging is essential for a good career. A well-executed blog sets you apart as an expert in your field.

Don’t tell yourself you’ll do it tomorrow. Blogging is about the courage to say something. Don’t worry about being stupid because trust me, no one is reading your blog. Post anything. You can nix bad posts later. For now just start writing.

So here I am. Hello, world! (Hello? Anybody?) That’s it for now, but I’ll be back soon.