MILESTONE! The most productive year by FAR, ever

 Considering the winter lazies have finally got to me, this is a strange time to be writing this, because I'm running behind on my projected post counts, and the quality has been in the dumps as of more recently. However, we're not here to complain, this is a time for celebration and joymaking, of this insane opportunity and time when my achievements in consistently being able to do the same thing over and over again have broken all records.

Specifically, this blog. Even more specifically, the post counts!

This post, when published, will be the 1207'th post of the year 2020, you will be able to see on the right. What's so great about that, you ask, besides the fact that it's a LOT of posts for not a lot of content? Well consider this: the sum total of all the posts I've ever ever written on this blog, over the course of the 12 years preceding this year, is also 1207. And that includes the MOST productive year besides this, last year when I put out 450 posts, which blew away the previous records I'd set. Which means, I've written more in the past 11.5 months, than I did in the 11.5 years before, and that's an insane amount of writing. Yeah the writing's not great, but the drive is there, the fire has not died. Hurray me!

What does that mean for you and I? For me it means that I know for sure writing is something I will keep doing as a part of my life for ever and ever, or at least as long as I can, because it's become a habit, the day I don't write I feel guilty, the weekends are gloomy, and when I write it feels like the day has met its worth. It also means that if I can tag along another activity with writing, such as meditation, which I should be doing everyday in the long term  anyway, it's not something ridiculous or out of the question. i can become a disciplined person if I really put my heart into it.

It's unclear as of yet if the word-count's there, if I've written more words over the year than every before combined, but it's likely that's the direction we're going towards. Because really I didn't do much of regular writing, the average wordcount per post wasn't too good. This year was pretty bad too until mid-year when I told myself to write more even if that meant compromising on the quality. That's the reason you'll have seen longer posts as of late: i'm taking my average post length from 450-500 words I'd set up as a goal for myself last year, to 800-900 that's my new goals. Again, it's about the quantity and quality at this point.

However, once I'm comfortably writing 800 -900 words every day, four times a day without too much cheating or using those stupid numbered lists or other structures, or perhaps because of them, my next goal is to actually start improving my writing. It's unclear where I would start from, I'm already on a path towards rulesetting and experimenting with different styles. Perhaps I'll make sure to follow prompts, but also a couple of rules that have been set for me by the writing guidebooks, do a thorough reading and make sure I didn't break any rules. Yes, that's going to make the writing sessions longer, which means more time commitment for me. But hey, if that really means an improvement in quality, that's an insane achievement. Four thousand-word posts a day, all of which are readable and decently edited would be a big gain for me.

In parallel to that, or perhaps a little more serial, I also plan to start making my writing more readable, targeting the actual reader reader which is not me, be kinder to my target audience. It's been about me, and it will be, a large part of me, but I want to be more kind, more sharing, more open to how my words could have an impact in the world. I want to write pieces that provoke thought, convince, make one wonder, make the reader want to keep on reading. The writing will not just for me, but primarily for the reader.

Also, perhaps I should start coding a bit more, and use programming to analyze my writing for obvious errors and cliches, use that as a 'scoring' function of some sorts, a teacher that's not there.

It's not an easy journey obviously, it's had its ups and downs, but one more year of this, and I'm sure I'll be ready to work on my books. This is looking good, I'm excited for it.