101 Reasons to Stop Writing

It’s been almost a year (347 days and counting) since 101 Reasons began on its mission to explore and chart the futility of the Writing Life. From not-terribly-funny beginnings, and a single link from a friend’s blog, it’s grown into the indie-cool shared secret it is today. And after all that time, I’ve only managed to write 15 Reasons.

I’ve decided to document this shame with a new box in the sidebar, featuring a visual progress indicator for those of you who have trouble mentally calculating the ratio of 15 to 101, and an estimated completion date, which is currently predicting March 15, 2013. Holy crap. The Iraq War might be over by then.

If you only discovered this site in the last few months, you might wonder why updates are so sporadic. Well, the excuse I mentioned back in February has been unexpectedly persistent. I’ll elaborate on this in a Reason eventually, but the gist is this: you can write when you have children, depending on how much of an asshole you’re prepared to be. But if you have 2 or more very young children (in my case, 2 under 2, plus 2 older), trying to write will make you insane. I’m talking “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” insane. Don’t say no-one warned you.

There’s definitely a small possibility that this situation is going to improve over the next few months. We may even hit Reason #20 by the end of the year. I may even be able to clear the enormous backlog of half-written draft entries I’ve got. Who knows, maybe we’ll even see the return of the Weekend Updates, and an occasional interview.

Far bigger things than this have been promised and not delivered, by far richer men than I. In the realms of improbability, this is almost plausible.

By the way, I recently upgraded the blogging software this site runs on (Wordpress 2.3, if you’re interested) to allow proper “tagging” of articles, so you’ll be able to find related posts more easily. Over the next few weeks/months I’ll be going through the archives, adding tags, fixing spelling errors and formatting problems, and repairing some truncated entries. I mention this because:

If you subscribe to the 101 Reasons feed, you may notice old articles appearing in the feed over the next few weeks as they get updated. I’m sorry for this inconvenience.