Seriously (that was only half serious), I don’t know the answer to this, beyond maybe developing good writing habits before it starts to seem like “work.” I somehow managed to do this early on. One thing that works for me is to try to get several posts done on the weekend, and then setting them to auto-publish once a day all week. Then if on any particular day you just don’t feel like it, something has been posted anyway that you wrote on a day when you did. Then you can skip a day without feeling too guilty.

Also, if feedback helps, I will just say that in my opinion, this is an excellent blog and I hope you keep it going, and I say that as a pseudo-quasi-competitor who is also trying to write law-related humor and so should have a tendency to hate anybody else who is good at it. And this is good stuff. As long as you still enjoy it, please keep cranking it out.

[...] at Popehat, in a post titled Blogging The Black Dog, asks blogging readers of Popehat: “What keeps you doing it?  How do you motivate yourself [...]

[...] “excitability” be a plus? [Patrick @ Popehat, and see [...]

I’ve had to do the same thing. Some of the silliest of throwaway posts I write get the most comments, while the most researched and thorough legal posts get nary a second look.

(2) Never be afraid to simply post a string of interesting links.

(3) Start to view going a day without posting as a moral / professional failure (WARNING: not advised).

A good friend who blogs on sports somewhat infrequently (at Braves & Birds) has asked me to join on with him but I won’t do it for the same reasons I rarely post here, even though his blog covers the only subjects I can arguably speak of with any coherence and authority outside of computer games (that being, Atlanta Sports teams, UGA athletics). That level of coherence and authority is tenuous, even fleeting, but it’s still more than I can muster for most other subjects.

I suppose it’s a little absurd (this pleases me) that a person who doesn’t write can get some sort of block (beyond motivational/fear/whatever issues), but there it is. At times when I have tried to sit down and write something (usually with a vague idea of something I want to write about, which doesn’t happen all that often), I stare at a blank screen into the very depths of nothing, and verily nothing looks back and that’s that.

I feel a level of guilt about all of this because the people who do contribute actively here are doing quality work.

For me, at this point, blogging is a hobby. Some guys go out in the garage and do stuff with wood or fix up cars. My grandpa gardened in the summer and built model boats in the winter. I write crap and post it on a blog.

What keeps me going.

Man, I just do that sucker. Might as well ask a monkey why he scratches.

Some days I’m busy, some days I don’t feel like it: nobody is paying me. Some days I sit down and make myself come up with something – I look at the text file of notes and find an old picture or dumb joke and post that sucker.

I run into the problem of not feeling like I have anything particularly insightful to contribute. Nothing that hasn’t been said better by many others, so whats the point. But then, some relevant news item will catch my eye, and I will realize either that I DO have some insightful commentary based upon rare, if not unique, experience, or at least I am motivated enough to research and aggregate some reasonably definsible paragraphs.

So don’t sweat it, your cobloggers probably have you covered during your black dog.

My only recommendations (which are probably not news to you) would be:

1) Coordinate among the Popehat bloggers so that the others step up their output when one of you enters a blogging drought.

2) Periodically host guest bloggers — fellow-thinkers, antagonists, significant others, syphilis-ridden hobos. As long as they’re good writers.

3) Institute a daily lolcatz post.

Maybe skip that last one.

My blog would actually be 50% better if I weren’t so introverted and didn’t have such an idyllic employment arrangement. I’ll have time to take my dog for a 60 minute walk first thing in the morning. So I’ll think of an issue that would make an interesting post; and then resolve the issue before returning home. Happily introverted, I now feel no need to raise the issue on the blog.

When I’m chained to a desk and thus don’t have time for long walks, I blog more because I don’t have the time to resolve the issues internally. So I throw something out there.

With Olson and the other guys, it’s a passion for a subject. Plus, there is always something new. So you can’t really develop “mastery” of current affairs; since it always changes.

I blogged on Section 1983 issues for years. The problem is that I now know everything there is to no about it. The law doesn’t change – except that it gets marginally worse for plaintiffs each year. So I really don’t feel compelled to post on Section 1983 issues much anymore. There is no spark.

As Hume would probably say: Blogging always follows emotion. If there is no emotion, there is no blog.

Thus, your desire to blog (or not blog) could probably be correlated with your moods and hormone levels. If we tracked serotonin and testosterone levels in your body, we’d probably see more posts on high neurotransmitter and hormone days; and fewer posts on lower days.

I’m betting most long-time bloggers like Wally Olson have high levels of excitability. If you took an MRI of their brains while blogging, it’s look much different from the average blogger’s brain.