A Blog For All Time, End of Year 1

            Last year at this time I decided on the nebulous goal of making sure I had a blog entry for every date on the calendar.  That way when my Facebook feed came around to stroke my ego via the “Memories” feature I would always have a sample of my own writing to crack out and post up.

            At this point I typically don’t repost my older stuff, as my old writing is mostly shit.  I apparently had a long-term relationship with run on sentences, and cheated on those with incomplete sentences.  Sometimes, when I write while drinking I go back to those relationships.

            What I am saying is, my old stuff is exactly what it was supposed to be, the junk I had to get out of my system to reach my current level of proficiency.  Almost like that was my stated goal when starting this blog and all subsequent writing projects I have done.  My spelling still hasn’t improved, but that I can blame on technology.

            Having something for everyday of the year is maybe not the best reason for why to write, but when you are trying to bang out a ton of words as an exercise in and of itself, you need motivation (any old excuse) to put fingers to keyboard.  Often that motivation amounts to “a day on the calendar must be made orange”.  I don’t know why I chose orange.

            Let’s take a look at the old calendar.

            Big empty spaces in October and December; somewhat empty spaces for March, July, and November; and just too many little holes all over the rest of the place.  No real rhyme or reason for this scatter shot.  Just several years of random activity layered on top of one another.

            Now let’s look at the new one.

 

I also switched from using the paint can to just drawing orange boxes over the day, allowing for a much cleaner fill.

            I feel I have made good progress on my goal.  Aside from months that were previously so empty that filling them would have required a plan of attack, I still turned a lot of the temporal map orange.

            117 open spaces has been reduced to 30.  Just 30.  I know few people reading this have a lot of writing experience and maybe if you do that sounds like just another year of your life, but for me that amount of writing is legendary.  Now that I have a full-time job there is no way I will ever have the time necessary to put down that many words in a year ever again.

            How did I do this?  I think the clearest thing I can point to is Dungeons and Dragons.  I have written about it more this year than any other year of my life, and if you were to mash all of the blogs I wrote together they would easily be the length of a book.  I have played around in Dungeons and Dragons since I was 15 but this was the first time I really hammered out entry after entry and put those entries out for people to read and absorb.

            For others to read, absorb, and criticize.

            I hope a few of them think I did well.

            Earlier this year I wrote my 400th blog on this site, on the 6^th anniversary of starting this blog.  This entry today is my 500^th blog.

            On the 26^th of April in 2013 I set a goal of writing 1,000,000 words.  As of right now, I am closing in on 600,000. 
            Between this day last year and now I wrote 216,302 words.  That is madness.

            One year ago today, I set out to fill my calendar.  While I have let numerous days pass by without getting an entry (1 of which because I thought a Hurricane was going to destroy my home town, luckily it did not), having an entry for everyday of the year is too easy a goal now.  I am too close to finishing it.

            I have to think of something else.

            I am just going to have to keep writing.

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