Observations on 10 Months of Very Mild Blogging

So it’s been about 10 months since I resurrected the idea of blogging in my mind, and I’ve managed only as many posts as there have been months. Let’s start with some standard statistics, because I love me some actual data:

My average word count has been 475, with a slow trend to more with each post. The last one really helped bring the average up, and it shows that I’m more likely to write a whole lot if I’m somehow invested in the topic emotionally.

January was the biggest month, full of hope and bravado. It helped that we were quarantined in the house in Japan on our vacation of mostly being sick. The biggest block came in April, where I fully lost track of all of this, and while on the one hand it’s ultimately up to me to find time to put finders to the keys to get these things happening, work really threw me for a loop there for awhile. I won’t get into specifics, but good golly the first half of this year was just a miserable time.

Things in that area improved greatly, but my return to the blog has been a rocky one, finally picking back up in October. This is also the first month I’ve gotten back into doing actual writing what is becoming almost daily again. The first draft of my book is 11% complete by word count, and around 5% of that has come in the last week (vs. the first half taking the better part of the summer).

After spending the first half of the year really trying to put the Save the Cat method to work, chatting about plot points and pacing with Chase, and buying silly supplies (“the board” is actually a really good exercise), maybe it’s just that finally now, with everything mapped out, the kinks just keep getting easier to work out, and the words seem to flow through so much more easily.

Other observations in the last ten months:

1. Google Chrome, as much as I’ve loved it, is starting to act up. I haven’t been able to write a blog post within Chrome in some time. Either it or WordPress are broken, or they’re angry at each other and ignoring the need to fix anything on either end of this.

2. Writing on the bus is a good time, but not as easy to exploit as I had hoped. There’s a double-edged sword depending on the time. Commute early and have a shorter travel time? Less time to work. Commute later and have a longer travel time? More time for typing, but a much higher chance of having to sit next to someone, which just awkwardifies the whole thing. That’s not a word. I don’t care. Overall, shorter time with higher chance of actually using it wins out.

3. I still have no idea what the golden publish time is. I tend to just let things fly, but I’m starting to wonder about scheduling these things to go out at specific times. Auto-posting to Facebook being broken sure doesn’t help matters. I’d complain about Google+ shutting down, but it’s been pretty much useless since launch, so that’s not so bad.

So here’s hoping I can keep up the pace and keep finding little moments to jump in and on again.