The post count has been alright, I've maintained a constant pace, even if that's meant rushing in and producing low-quality material. It's all a part of the journey, the fear of being judged is the biggest block for a writer. Better to produce crap content nobody wants to read than high-quality shit that never gets written anyway. That way at least the writer gets some practice.
Word count was disappointing the last time I checked, averaged slightly below 400 words per post. That's the reason why I'm now upping my 'baseline' wordcount from 500 words to 600+ ideally 700 or higher. When I need to play catchup and I realize that's most of the time these days, I hit 500 and give up. Writing longer poems is a challenge but somehow I'm doing it. Of course the compromise is on quality but you can't have everything.
Quality-wise, it's a mixed bag. I haven't improved as much as I would have hoped, not in the past ten years. Didn't write as fiercely as I've been doing the last year though. It's a craft, that needs practice and proper training. Proper training I'm lacking, which is why I've set myself some limitations. The 'structures' for example, force me to do something interesting. The fiction pieces I do have grown on me. Most of the journals are crap, but they're not written to impress, they're memory aids for the future. A way to extend life, as it is, for when I ask myself 'where have the days gone by'. I can show myself these posts and say, 'ah yes, that's where they went, I walked around for three hours in Somerville every day'.
Speaking of the new structures I'm playing with, as I write more I know what works and what does not, I've been extending them, culling the ones that don't seem like a fit, and forcing myself to work with some that I have a tough time exploring. Generally, I've covered pretty much all the posts, at least once. I should start tagging them, so I can keep track of progress. With 1200+ posts a year it's going to become difficult to go into the archives and search for something in particular if I don't know the exact key words. Should tag the journal entries as well.
I have been opening up and exposing myself greatly in these posts, and honestly it's part of the existence now. I need to be following and reading the posts on writing from the community. They say you grow as a writer only as you grow as a person. Many jokes I want to make on that. I have grown as a person, I won't. Hopefully that means I'm a better writer now?
The hope of writing for the papers still burns bright. Non-fiction essays people want to read, not just a desperate attempt to remain relevant by writing nonsense, hoping it turns into usable material some day. "Tall tales from afar", I've already said what it's going to be about. Seems like there's no takers. Alas. Maybe I should reach out to folks at my old workplace.
The one thing I've been really struggling with, and this post is an attempt to fix that, is I've been unable to write in the mornings for a while now. When things were 'on site' back in the day, I wrote two posts before work, one on the trains, and two in the evenings. I was going at five posts a day! Lately it's been a struggle to get anything done in the morning, so four posts are smooshed in the evenings, mostly after 8. As you can imagine, it's quite some work. If I could frontload half of it, the evening writings would be just one post and a journal entry, that would kick ass! Life would be easy, wouldn't have to spend ages for doing nothing. Maybe I could increase the lengths to a thousand words per post then?! So that's the next big goal I'm working towards besides angling myself to be a publicly read writer. Which is why I'm writing this before work, at 8.35 in the morning.
That's about...everything I can think at the moment. I should do these every month or so.
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