One Month To Go – Don’t Screw It Up!

Back in January I promised to write every day that month. Then I just kept going.

Now, I’m in the home stretch with one month to go. I’ve gone without a miss and I’m proud of the work that’s been published. I would have never thought that I would have something to say every day of the year but I guess I did. Not every post was a winner – there’s a probably a dozen or two that I’d like removed. The bad hair days of writing, if you will.

That’s actually not an apt metaphor as I don’t have bad hair days.

I have some big projects for 2013 which include a book of some sorts, launching some silly merchandise, and a podcast. The first one I’m trying to tackle is the podcast. I have a solid idea (I think) that blog readers would find interesting. Currently figuring out some of the engineering and technical skill required to make it work. I’m hoping for the first episode to go live by January 1.

If I had to sum up what I learned this year from all the writing, I would answer with, “Not much.” I learned really only one thing – if you do something you’re not particularly good at, and do it a lot, then you get good at it. Knowing that there wasn’t an option not to come up with a post every day really forced me to learn how to sit at a blank screen and start writing. Unless something goofy happens to me throughout the day (which rarely happens), I’m on the hook for creating something out of the blue.

What I normally do is scrub my current feelings and see if I can find something to relate outwards. This year I dealt a lot with sadness so that was a major theme. Shame, too. Hopefully next year will be more about fear and anger. Those are way more fun to write about.

The other lesson I’ve learned is to give up control. It’s way too hard for me to manage everything. I still try most of the time, but I’ve cut back  immensely. Needing each post to have perfect grammar and syntax is crazy since I don’t even understand comma rules. I still freak out if the site goes down or I don’t get any comments on a post. It happens and trying to stop it is pointless.

Here’s an example – I never check my stats anymore because it either bums me out or makes me feel awesome. I just looked, for a goof. Turns out the last two days traffic was down about 30%. No idea why. I can’t imagine everyone decided I needed to feel like a failure and decided to teach me a lesson. I’m not that important. But it did bum me out just now. I’m not the center of anyone’s life and I’m guessing people just forgot to check out the blog the past two days. Or I accidentally hit publish on that piece I wrote about how it’s okay to punish your wife for her misdeeds by assigning her more housecleaning.

Damn – now that I’m thinking about it, that would have been a hilarious post on its own. Oh well.

I’ll try not to let the content go to shit in the last month. I still need to get my holiday cards out, and if you remember what I did last year, this should again be fun.

Lastly, Aunt Becky from MommyWantsVodka and I are planning a reader party in January if you live nearby Chicago. Should be awesome.

photo credit: AmusingThailand via photopin cc