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Guys, I have to admit something. Here goes… I blog my first drafts.

Not always! There are some posts that I meticulously plan ahead of time, really think out so that I know the best possible angle to approach the topic from just like I would a fiction project or a paid article. But while it’s not uncommon for my fiction, eBooks or other paying writing gigs to go through hundreds of drafts, the majority of my blog posts are things I write up quickly, read one or twice to catch typo’s and fire off into cyberspace.

If you want to get literal, how I actually write a blog post is this: I have a general topic in mind and I just sit down, type,  and see what develops. Sometimes I end up going off on a tangent and splitting the post up into several posts. And, honestly, sometimes I completely lose the thread of what I was going on about and I can the whole post but, honestly, that’s rare. I’ve been doing this writing thing for so long, I can always spin words into something. Maybe not gold but at least something I’m not embarrassed to hit “Publish” on.

Why am I confessing this to you? Because I’ve heard so many people who want to start blogging but are intimidated because they think every post needs to be High Literature (Random barely related thought: how unreadable would a blog by Shakespeare be?) and I just wanted to be honest about how I blog.

Could I write a much better post after 10 drafts than I do in a single pass through? Of course. But then you’d get maybe three blog posts a year from me instead of one or more a week. I am fully aware that the writing on this blog is not the best that I can do but, you know what? Good enough is always better than nothing at all and that’s a very important thing to remember.

If you’re someone who’s been itching to start a blog but you’ve been intimidated by the act of writing, this is me endorsing the giddy freedom of just writing up any old thing, giving it a quick proofread and firing it off into the e-ther (I am very proud of that joke.) Sometimes it’s more important to get something out there even if it isn’t entirely perfect than to strive for perfection for so long you never actually accomplish anything.

What about you? Do you draft blog posts ahead of time or do you just go for first version?