A New Streak

Throughout the first six years of this blog, I’ve been pretty random about posting content. Pretty much the only guarantees would be a race report at some point during the week after a race. Depending on the race, you also had maybe a 50/50 chance of a preview post the week before. Other than that it was a complete crapshoot.

I’ve always been impressed by those writers who were able to crank out an article or blog post every week. The ability to not only write an article for 52 straight weeks, but frankly to even have that many ideas for articles always amazed me. I’ve wanted to be more consistent in my writing, but the pressure of having to write something each week has put me off. I write because it’s enjoyable (at times) and putting out content that often would seem to detract from that.

I had tried a while back to write for 10 minutes each day. Yeah, that lasted about a week. Well, I’ve decided to resurrect the idea in a different form and become more consistent with my writing (or “writing”) in 2022. My running streak (3400 days+ and counting) has done wonders for my running and I figure something similar to that would benefit my writing. Now writing every day didn’t work for me before, but maybe writing a blog post each week would be doable.

So my goal is to have a new post up here each Wednesday. This isn’t meant to be a New Year’s resolution thing. I don’t really believe in those. In reality, I already started this a month ago. But you probably already noticed that. Ha!

My experience so far has been much better. My weekly posting streak has helped motivate me to spend more time writing, however it hasn’t become a chore that I have to do every day. It might be one of those things where a daily run streak is good for my running, but a daily writing streak is bad for my writing. Or it could turn into a daily writing streak.

A side benefit of my recent motivation is that I’m spending more time on each post. Before I would have an idea, throw a bunch of words on a page, give it a quick review for obvious grammatical errors, and press Publish. If my muse was strong enough, it would flow from thought to thought smoothly and be entertaining to read. And if it wasn’t. . . well, I wasn’t overly concerned with the quality. Good enough was good enough. I’m now going back and instead of a quick once over, they’re getting third and fourth overs. I’ll never get to the point of spending 6 hours on any given post, however the overall quality will hopefully improve somewhat.

It’s also possible that this writing momentum is just a function of having a half dozen ideas to play with at present. If I have just one thing to write about and I’m not all that excited about the topic, then it’s tough to crank out 500 words on it. Much easier to write about my best of 8 ideas though. Fingers crossed the ideas keep coming.

So basically, I have no idea how long I’ll be able to keep up this torrid pace. Could be a month. Could be a year. Maybe even much longer than that. Only time will tell.