100 Posts: What Have I Learned

99 posts in my first full year, which is not quite two posts a week. I had set myself a three posts a week goal, which would have been 156 posts in a year. Not quite. Not close.

And, I don’t care. I did it. I kept doing it. I got it done. I’m still doing it.

And now it is time to take stock and get my act together for 2021…

…which I hope is a lot less interesting than 2020.

This is my 100th post. What Did I Learn?

1. Keep punching those leys.
2. Take a day off. It is okay not to write when I don’t want to write. I just have to be sure not to let one day stretch into a week, which has happened.
3. Don’t commit to goals you don’t care about. Why 3 posts a week? I don’t know. So, I would have a lot of posts by the end of the year and the blog would feel most successful and have more content. and be more impressive maybe. 156 posts is meaty, takes a while to read through, looks a lot more established than ten posts. I don’t know why. I set an arbitrary goal for purely surface reasons and I didn’t reach it because I didn’t really care about it.
4. Life happens. I expected to have juicy content this year. Jussie Smollett’s trial. Operation Varsity Blues. Monique’s lawsuit against Netflix. Lori Loughlin in court trying to wriggle her way away out of this scam. Fingers on the keys and none of it happened. COVID took over and stopped all of that, ran everyone indoors, got Lori Loughlin to settle over Skype or Zoom or whatever it was. Jussie is all I have left and there is no telling when he will go to trial. My content dried up in self-isolation, and I had to make do the entire year with whatever I could find.
5. Make yourself do it. I can tell you how many more posts I would have if I had written them when I was supposed to – 56. But, I do know that after five, six days, making myself do it was how the next post got written and put up. It’s how a good half of them got written. It’s why my blog is still running.
6. Engage. I should have commented on ten times more posts easily, just to get a conversation going, just to turn my blog into what I want it to be: busy, active,
7. Promote. I should have at least promoted this blog on my Twitter page. Starting with this one, then. If the full blogging experience is what I want, then I have to do the full blogging thing.
8. Don’t wait for inspiration. Actions generates inspiration, someone said, and I suppose that’s true. Just getting in front of my keyboard and writing what was on my mind produced easily a third of these posts.
9. Write about what you know. I am not good at anything else, at any other kind of writing. And I know it, now. Writing about myself seems so selfish, so self-absorbed, so self-centered, and narcissistic. It’s such a narrow focus. I wanted my blog to be about the world, other people, ideas, events, and everything is about me, my life, struggles, thoughts, opinions, belief system. Me. It’s the subject I am most comfortable with and I know the most about. And, honestly the blogs, the twitter accounts I like to read the most, are the ones that read like diaries, just someone writing about a day in their life. Maye that’s what I should do.

Photo by Marcin Skalij on Unsplash