Anatomy of a failed blog post

It starts innocently enough:

1. You decide to read email on your iPhone one morning instead of rising to start your day.
2. Included is a post from a favorite blog. The title appeals to you so you read it.
3. Not only is this piece an enjoyable read, you also decide to click an included link that takes you to a blog you've never seen before.
4. The second post is not only an enjoyable read, it's also inspiring. Making you think, "This could be useful fodder for a blog post of my own!"
5. So you bookmark the page for later, and get up to start your day.
6. Later that evening, you're engaged with friends in lively dinner conversation.
7. One of those friends says something that reminds you of that second blog post you read earlier.
8. Loose threads start to weave themselves into a bit of narrative. You are pleased at the surprise turn of events.
9. Several days pass before you sit down to actually begin writing the Dually Inspired Blog Post.
10. Now begun, you dive in in earnest. You craft phrases, string them together, insert, remove, delete whole sentences, begin a second time, even rework your entire approach. Ultimately you discover more potential in the piece than you'd initially thought.
11. Locating the bookmark on your phone, you pull it up on your laptop for reference.
12. Having read the original piece on a streamlined-for-mobile presentation, the site looks nothing like you imagined it would. Have you even found the right site?
13. Reading on, you discover that you have!
14. You also discover... that the piece was written by a woman. This wouldn't customarily matter at all, but this particular post? This post was distinctive in that the theme around which it was centered relied on your belief that it was, in fact, written by a man.
15. Otherwise, the thread connecting the blog post and your dinner conversation would quickly unravel.
16. And unravel it has. It's laying there in the floor, in fact, in a honkin' pile of discarded, wrinkled thread.
17. You suspect the idea was never that good anyway, and trash the whole piece. With nothing left to make you care about the topic, you decide you're actually doing your readers a favor and embrace a wave of gratitude that you didn't spend more time actually crafting the original blog post.
18. Or, even worse... publishing it.
19. But maybe you could solicit nods of affinity from your blogging readers by sharing your silly slice-of-life.
20. Or shed more light on the practice for your non-blogging readers. (Either that, or confuse them even further about why anyone would bother to spend time in this endeavor in the first place.)

Here's to the anticipation of fresh inspiration any day now. Right. Around. The. Corner.