Hey, writing is fun again!

Here is a picture my dad took in Antarctica last year. I think he's not only happy to have been there, but also enjoyed the journey too. I promise those two sentences will make more sense after you read the post.

Over the last few months, I’ve started posting more frequently here on the blog. And I just noticed that I actually enjoy writing again.

For the first two thirds of this year, I was writing a book. As it turns out, this is not the easiest thing to do on top of working a full-time job at a company that is still in startup mode. Who knew?

According to our New Kind time-tracking system, it took 138 hours for me to write 300 pages. And another 130 hours to edit. So, add in a few other book-related tasks, and I spent roughly 300 hours of 2011 working on The Ad-Free Brand.

To put it in perspective, 300 hours is almost eight weeks of a full time job. Or enough time to fly back and forth to Singapore sixteen times. I could have watched 100 major league baseball games or had 100 practices with my band. I could have taken a lot more bike rides. I could have breathed more fresh air. I could have written more blog posts.

But I didn’t, I wrote a book instead.

And, while, I’m glad I did, I can’t say it was an entirely fun experience. Looking back, I feel the same way about the book as I feel about going to Antarctica. I’d really like to have been there… but I’m not so interested in the actual experience of going there. Sounds cold, difficult, and I’d probably get seasick.

So I like having written a book, but the writing itself?

That part sucked.

Writing a blog post is like running a sprint. You go really fast for a few seconds, then you can relax and eat snacks. Writing a book is more like running a marathon (or what I expect that might be like, anyway, I haven’t done it). You write for hours and hours then, when you are starting to get really, really tired of it, you look up, see a mile marker, and realize you still aren’t even half way to the finish line. Writing books is an endurance sport, and I think I’m more of a sprinter.

While I’ve written throughout my life because I love the process of writing, I noticed because of the book I no longer got up early in the morning to write blog posts or stayed up late at night getting a thought exactly right. It just felt too much like work. But just the other evening, writing this post about Netflix, Apple, and Facebook, I realized I was actually enjoying it again.

So that’s why I have been blogging more often. I’m enjoying it, and hope that comes through in what you read here.