Re: Speed Journaling
One of the things I tried doing at the start of June, to kick-start my daily publishing habit, was to sit down with a pen and paper and write without stopping. I just unloaded a stream of consciousness onto the paper, much like Scott Jones's description of Speed Journaling.
Surprisingly, I find it much more comforting to write on paper where only one side is empty, like junk mail and old printouts. In contrast to writing in a notebook or journal, where things seem more "final", these single-sided sheets feel more friendly, more tolerant of mistakes and nonsense. The form provides comfort - rubbish can be easily discarded instead of being preserved in a notebook, possibly in the midst of actually useful things.
I found this exercise supremely helpful in breaking through that initial barrier to writing. My sessions lasted longer than I'd expected, and I was quite surprised by the random tangents I went on, some of which developed into seeds of other blog posts.
It was also a lot of fun to just write without thinking too much. The benefit of doing this by hand is that, if you're anything like me, your hand moves slower than your mind, providing just enough time to generate the next word and keep moving along.
Postscript: I first came across this idea from Stephen Lloyd Webber's Deep Freewriting, of which I read only the Amazon excerpt. That was enough to get started.