Writing – Your Experience May Vary

Image unrelated.

I’ve proven fairly poor at keeping the blog flowing, though I feel oddly fine with it. The last 12 months have been all sorts of strange, and The List proved more of a constant focus. While I finished very little, I made progress on quite a lot.

45,000 words I’ve managed to write, which is only half way there. More importantly, it’s half way there. With how things were going last year, I didn’t imagine I’d get that far. It’s been a few hundred words here an there, usually on the bus back and forth. The important thing is just to keep going and not to worry whether or not it’s trash. Trash can be fixed. Blank pages can be fixed, too, and usually by writing trash. It seems to be a pretty simple two-step process (after the various steps leading up to getting myself to start in the first place.) I feel pretty good about getting the first draft out this year, and having some time to take care of the last mile on a number of other things.

As noted above, I’ve obviously failed at the whole “post a bunch of stuff on the Internet” thing. The next blogs-per-month data set for 2019 is going to have a big hole in the summer. Life happens, and it keeps on happening. It doesn’t help that at any given moment I feel obligated to dislike doing anything on Facebook or Twitter. It’s part of why I ended up going the blog route at all. Searches for “Why you should hate Twitter” and “Why you should hate Facebook” result in piles of rants, which may all be justified. “Why you should hate WordPress” results in mostly unrelated things, and one post telling me I’m supposed to think WordPress is confusing, but I should use it anyway. They’d done a better job of one of the following: 1) not being evil, 2) not looking like they’re evil, 3) somehow controlling all Internet opinions of them. I’m guessing it’s one of the first two.

Something I have certainly learned, and it explains a lot of what feels like the procedural generated Internet of today: quantity > quality until people actually start looking. I have no idea how many people have read this vs. how many have “read” it (picking up key words and randomly subscribing automatically because someone decided they should code a robot to do that.) If I were interested in aggressively amassing followers I’d probably be better off setting up something to scrape reddit for that auto-summarizing bot and just copy/past them. I’m not really into that, though, so I’ll just keep posting when I post. Perhaps this year the mood will strike more frequently. Perhaps more now that I’ve started getting Chase to record his complaining about things with me. Why keep all that to ourselves when we could have randos consume it and share in the whatever that is. The important thing is it’s a good time, and there’s plenty of creative commons music to slap on it to give it that extra bit of pizazz.

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:

Post Number	Word Count	Month
1	122	1
2	367	1
3	459	1
4	330	1
5	597	1
6	270	1
7	518	2
8	319	3
9	528	7
10	549	10
11	1164	10

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.

Your Experience May Vary

Tag: Writing

The List Persists

Observations on 10 Months of Very Mild Blogging