Tools of the Trade
The last few nights my writing spot has been the screened porch. The pollen tempest of the past few weeks is now just light misting at best, allowing us to clean off the table and chairs and not feel like we wasted our time.
This lovely combination of low humidity and warm weather won’t last in these parts, so I’ve taken advantage of it the best I could, streaming Yacht Club Radio on Pandora and writing away. I even flipped on the decorative light strings my darling wife bought last year and had me hang around the top of the screens. I kinda like it now. Yes, dear. I know you were right. Again.
Anyway, this post will go out in email on Wednesday, May 1st, and will the 42nd consecutive post of my weekday blog experiment. I will likely send out a Throwback Thursday post this week, too. Then, I’ll start a new pattern next week as I move back inside to the war room I’m creating to tackle a summer of fiction writing. Along with finishing book two, I have several other projects in mind, including teaming up with a special partner. More on that in the months to come.
For the final original post in this “sprint” (to borrow a term from some project leaders at work), I thought I’d offer up some final thoughts and lessons learned.
Photo Credit: wuestenigel Flickr via Compfight cc
First, this binge was inspired by one of my favorite motivators, Seth Godin. I’ve mentioned at least two of his books during the course of the past eight weeks. He sends a blog post out each day and encourages others to do the same. He will occasionally highlight people who pass 1000 published posts. In my ten plus years of dabbling in several blogs, I have published around 250 posts. And after this forty-something streak, I am even more in awe of those who hit the 1000 mark. It’s not currently a goal of mine, but being consistent going forward is now.
Second, I stated the goal of the exercise was for me to take action and hopefully some good things would happen, like finding a writing desire again and possibly encouraging others. I’ve definitely found the writing groove and motivation again. I hope I can carry it on to the fiction phase coming up. Also, several people reached out to me privately with thanks for the posts. Looks like I inspired a few. Thanks for letting me know.
Third, I’m proud of a few things during this stretch. Several times I found myself without much of a post at 7 pm. Despite grand plans to do better planning on the weekends, that only happened once or twice. With an unofficial goal each night of a 10 pm bedtime, I had to hustle to write and edit a post.
I made it most nights. Once or twice I started late and didn’t finish until after 11 pm. I also never put out anything that I thought was junk. Sure, some posts were better quality than others, but I feel like I put in a solid effort on everything. A couple of posts even started out one way and went a completely different direction, like The Teetotaler. That’s a really cool experience.
Finally, my blogging software tells me the daily post views count. My most viewed post was David Versus The Goliaths because my son’s highly connected triathlon coach shared it out. That post hit at least a dozen foreign countries. The second most viewed post was The Chick-fil-A Chronicles Episode One post, likely because I used Chick-fil-A in the title. Guess I need to write Episode two. That Darn Cube post was also highly viewed. My personal favorite new post was The Teetotaler because of the aforementioned change of direction, and I thought The Human Touch was amongst the most creative. My favorite Throwback Thursday post, and probably all-time, is The RBG4 Time Machine. It neatly, and I think very creatively, summarizes my entire youth baseball experience in one post.
Hope you’ve enjoyed the posts and thanks for reading,
PS. I didn’t really write any about it yet, but February 2019 was one of the roughest months in our family’s recent history. We experienced the unexpected death of my mother-in-law who lived with us for the past 13 years. Looking back, re-starting the blog at the beginning of March might have been a self-therapy technique. Perhaps running can’t solve everything.
Now, at the start of May, a lot of areas in life are looking better again. I won’t mention specifics yet, but at the moment, I’m hoping that pinpoint of light I see at the end of the tunnel is the opening and not another train. I will reveal one exciting positive note, though: I won free tickets to see Earth Wind and Fire in concert next week. I’m telling you, things are picking up.
If you missed some posts, here they are in order from March 4th through April 30:
