My swimming instructor likes to say that he’s not teaching us to swim from one point to another – that’s just being able to handle ourselves in the water. He is teaching us to swim for long distances, over lengthy periods – that’s real swimming.

Part of doing that is establishing a breathing pattern. It doesn’t do you any good to hold your breath until you absolutely need air right now because you starve your muscles that way and get tired faster. Also, air is kind of important to the whole staying afloat process. So you breathe regularly, every four strokes or so.

I figure the same tip holds true for a blog. If you can establish a regular pattern and stick with it, you’re less likely to flounder around so much. Posting once a day or once a week gives you a regularity that you can play around with: every third week is about the colour red, Mondays are about feminism and so on. It makes blogging seem less like work and more like something to look forward to.

(You could just wait until you had something ‘post-worthy’ but readers prefer blogs with some kind of regular schedule.)

Pax.