"I've Decided"

I've decided to start a blog, and I expect it to suck.  To a certain extent, I rather hope it will suck.  My skills are shit.  Coming up with words is far too easy for me, and I think that the glibness I'm generating is doing my writing some harm.  So I'm trying to give myself the permission to suck.

For one thing, I'm not editing so much: the last sentence above would probably not have had the word "the" in it if I had been trying to sound smooth and natural the way a blogger probably should.  I guess this tells you I'm a blogger now.  Does it signify anything that I'm typing this while I'm talking to my wife?  I was just telling her that I'm not trying as hard here to be coherent as I would if I were doing this writing for some other reason than to let myself stumble in public.  Possibly I can't help myself. We will, I suspect, see.

Among the things I'm thinking is that I should impose some sort of minimum word count on myself so that I keep doing this until I can derive some benefit from it.  Since I don't know quite what sort of benefit (I almost wrote "exactly" instead of "what"--see, I'm editing despite myself) I expect to derive, I really don't know what sort of minimum I should set for myself.  Maybe I should type until the scroll bar appears in the text box I'm typing into, or until I've typed for a specific amount of time.  I hope earnestly that you, the reader who may or may (more likely) not exist currently, enjoy the fumbling around that these first few entries promise.  How many blogs start by this kind of earnest fumbling? Or start with it?

I think my actual voice (what Peter Elbow in his book Writing with Power calls "real voice") may be drowning under my articulacy.  I paused for a moment just before the last word in that last sentence to think about whether to include an adjective, to characterize my articulacy in some way; as you can see (if you're there, if you're looking) I didn't do that.  What I'm trying to accomplish here, though--one of those things, anyway--is to not need to pause, to find out what I'm trying to say rather than the smoothest or most articulate way to say it.  Is this possible?  We (I?) shall see.