Here’s to a new year

Initially this was intended to be posted on January 1, but things just got in the way.

I wanted it to be a New Year’s Resolution of sorts, pledging to write more this year. I wanted to build on the success I had in the latter part of 2020 when I reeled off 65 straight posts. When I recorded my second highest total, 72, and my best output since 2014 when I had 71 posts.

But I never got there.

It is best, looking back, to do it now. I have posted for the entire month of April, 30 straight days, and am embarking on a new month and continuing this latest streak.

So this is not so much a resolution to start of a calendar year, but a resolution for a 12-month period.

The writing habit
That resolution is a simple one – to develop the writing habit. There is no point in setting goals of this many posts in a month or that many posts in a year. Instead, it is much more valuable to create that habit of writing regularly. It takes something like six weeks, or maybe a couple months, to develop a new habit. That is what I am going to try to do.

To that end, I keep what I like to call my word count log, where I write down how many words I write every day. It seems to help because it sure is gratifying to look back and see what has been accomplished, and how the writing habit has a cumulative effect. Even a few words a day turns into a lot more when they're all added together after a week or a month.

It has also done some other things for me.

Blog ideas
My writing back log has been cleared up. I had exactly 30 post ideas sitting in the “Draft” folder of the blogging software I use. Those are all gone – all posted and there for the world to read now.

Some of them were topics that I just started because I wanted to keep a streak going. I did not give them much thought. But, I just could not delete them because they caught my attention for some reason, so I wrote about them. This has taught me two things – one is to not pick topics whimsically or haphazardly but give them some thought. The other is creating an actual post makes it real, so it becomes something I had to finish. And sometimes, it meant I started out by just free writing about a topic, such as David Cassidy or Morgan Woodward, and found a theme, some connection to the 1980s, that turned into a pretty serviceable post.

I shouldn’t say the back log is gone, because there are still a few things. I will deal with those, then I will get on with another aspect of this whole process for me – my bulging idea file. Sitting in two file folders in my work office are newspaper clippings, printouts from the Internet, and notes I have scribbled to myself on scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes. Now is the time to dig deep in there. I know, there are a lot of topics I have already used, but I know there are many more I have not done yet. That is the beauty of scribbling a note right away – striking while the iron is hot – because often I forget about it soon after I wrote it down. Re-discovering these ideas is energizing.

Parting thoughts
Always at the back of my mind I have thought if it would be possible to post 1,000 entries. Right now I am at 390. This will make number 391. I am not sure if I will get there because I am just under 40 per cent there and it has taken 8.5 years.

Maybe developing a writing habit will get me there.

So here's to a new year of writing and forming the writing habit.