So: I’m happy that I’ve kept up MaBloWriMo for 13 days so far, but I’m running out of steam. I’ve gone through essentially all of the posts in my backlog that were relatively easy to write, and the things I’d like to write about at this point either
- really should be done with diagrams (and it’s not easy to finish a blog post with diagrams in a day) or
- might take more time than I allot for blogging in a day to work through the relevant concepts.
Sticking to one post a day at this point is likely to drive down quality, so I think I am going to stop doing it. It was a good goal for awhile in that it got me to write some posts that I’d wanted to write for a long time now, but unfortunately it is now doing the opposite of that.
Annoying Precision 
I tried writing blogs with time limit once, but I felt wrong about the results. (The article is not ready yet, I should improve some things and add some graphics, but it’s already too late and I have to publish the blog now.) But I think it could work with writing the articles in advance, and just publishing them in given intervals; assuming one can reliably write much faster than given interval.
I guess that if I can’t write articles within the time limit, pushing myself to write faster is not enough; I should find out what is wrong. Maybe I actually don’t like the topic — I just convinced myself that I should like it. Maybe what I am trying to do it soo complex for given time interval; perhaps I should split long article into a sequence of shorter ones. Maybe my software sucks, and it takes too much time to publish an article; but if I start changing the software, I will not be able to keep the writing schedule at the same time.
Qiaochu you are not texing any more notes for the spring semester?
I am, but I haven’t finished deciding what classes I’m taking this semester yet.
Unrelated question: what do you use to make those awesome drawings in your geometry notes (for example, here http://math.berkeley.edu/~qchu/Notes/274/Lecture1.pdf) and put them in LaTeX?
Thank you.
They were drawn in Paper.
I started by setting a minimum of 2 posts/month, and I am slowly trying to work up from that. I will be pretty happy if I can get to 1/week, while still writing about something that I really want to write about, which isn’t easy with research, teaching and marking. Good job on the 13 days though!
I am impressed you lasted so long. I thought only Akhil Mathew could do it, and even him would need a bit of cheating I am sure. 🙂
Don’t worry and congratulation for having made it so far.