A Month of Blogging

Today's post will be simple. I only want to talk about one thing: I managed to blog every day in April, including those days when I was exceptionally busy (doing final assignments, out of the house all day, the ball). It was fun, though. I loved sitting down and writing a post about life, or writing, or comic books, or the terrifying reality that adult life will well and truly start in a matter of weeks.

Fun, right?

It's helped me get a lot of thoughts out, though, in a way that nothing else has. On top of that, it's ensured that   I stuck to my New Year's Resolution to write every day this year.

But just how much did I write this month? Here are the statistics:

Over the past 29 days, I wrote 24402 words, an average of 813 words per post.

My longest post was 1843 words, on April 11th: The Write Life.

My shortest post was a mere 183 words, on April 24th: Shortlisted. I wrote it on my phone on a bus late at night, unsure what to say.

My most viewed post was Aspiring? from April 6th.

My most commented-on post was When I Grow Up from April 2nd.

This month has had the most views overall out of any other month since statistics kicked in in July 2008.

Let's look at those statistics in terms of what they are equivalent to. During the month, I wrote enough words to have written a novella. My longest post consists of more words than the average required to complete NaNoWriMo. People engaged most with posts about dreams and aspirations in writing.

Considering the amount of work I've had to do, the last-chance days with friends, working weekends, still being in college for half the month, and having two poetry nights to attend, I think I did quite well to have written all that I did. If I were to replicate such writing outside of blogging, I could still write a novella per month, or a 75,000 word novella in three. This is without pushing myself to write the NaNoWriMo minimum every day. Doing that would half the amount of time it takes me write something - given the average words per post - which means that, in theory, even with a full-time job, I could still write a few books per year.

That makes the future much less terrifying.

There has always been this fear that full-time employment would reduce the amount of writing I could do to a bare minimum, and not enough to actually pursue it as a career. Given the fact that I still work a lot under pressure from college assignment and Teaching Placement, I think I'll be alright.

And, for the record, as of this post I have written 24900 words in the month, an average of 830 per post. That's pretty cool, right? If you want to check out this month's posts, click on the following link: http://paulcarrollwriter.blogspot.com/p/april-2013-posts.html

Green

Beside me is a green folder. In it is contained a list of projects I wish to complete by the end of the year, and the various tasks I need to do to actually complete them. These are all books or other, associated, writing projects.

On my desk is a green envelope. I have spoken about this before. It contains a number of topics to write about. Essentially, it takes the control away from me, but makes things more exciting.

Here is one simple fact about these green items and their contents: they stand to make my life much more interesting and fulfilling if I could actually get around to addressing the various items within them. To that end, I'm hoping to increase my writing output over the next few months.

This will not be an easy task. I have exams to face - Dreaded Exams - and tiredness to battle. Right now, the latter is kicking my ass.

What I want to do is set myself up in such a way that I can produce twice as much per day as I had originally intended. Not one item per day, but two. Obviously, on days like this when the tiredness is too much and my eyes hate me for looking at a screen, I can't over-write. But other days? Not a problem.

While my lectures go on for a while tomorrow, I do have an opportunity to do something of value with my time. I'll have a few hours after college to actually write. I am yet to decide what I will write, and will probably see how I feel. If I can't decide on anything, it's to the item on my wall - from the green envelope. If I want to address one of my larger goals, I'll go to the folder.

It's simple, right?

I managed at least five hundred words a day during teaching placement. Who's to say I can't write even more now that the actual stress of day-to-day life is significantly less? I'm going for it. I am. Two items a day, about a thousand words a day. On weekends (and Fridays), maybe three items per day.

Tiredness may be beating me now, but these items of green won't stand a chance once I get started.

I'm screwing myself over, aren't I?

How's That New Year Coming?

We're on Day 7 of this great fabrication known as the New Year. Personally, I love it. It's not so much that the concept of a New Year's Resolution is so revolutionary that it shouldn't be ignored, so much as I love the idea of so many people deciding to make a positive change in their lives. Naturally, I join in, and it's one of the few times in my life I will consciously conform to a particular standard (I'm okay with conforming if it happens by accident!).

My aim to write every day is going quite well. It has, so far, produced half of what may well become a short ebook. That, or a section of a longer book. It's all on planning, which fit in nicely with my teaching placement and the need to produce 80 lesson plans in four weeks. Surprise surprise, that's not as much fun as it sounds.

Okay, I jest. I don't mind actually having to do it, and I'd be screwed in class without a lesson plan, but that doesn't mean 80 of them are a lot of fun, when you throw in resources for every lesson, too.

Anyway, back on track. That planning craic. So far, it's five connected articles that need to be drawn together and reworded, but they're essentially half an ebook focusing on some considerations for planning. The other half of the book or section would consist of methods of planning. If there's one thing teaching college has taught me it's that everyone learns and thinks in different ways, so no one method will suit every person who could potentially read the book.

So, there's that. I've also managed to write myself a couple of poems. One has seen the light of day, the other hasn't, but I loved doing them both an awful lot. I consider poetry a project, because every one I've written recently has been accompanied by an image, an audio track and, eventually, a video. This has meant that rather than simply writing the words and posting them online, there's a whole added experience of performance and mood-setting music and the search to find a new means to share an ancient art form.

I don't suppose I will ever grow tired of writing this way. The articles are refreshing every time I come back to them, the poems always requiring a bit more work than just writing, and I've got an unreal amount of fiction to write my way through over the next year.

Would I have done it without the New Year? Possibly, I would have begun. But the social dimension of New Year provides the additional kick everyone needs when tired or busy to ensure they stick to a change in their lives.

Of course, writing isn't the only thing I'm doing. Every day, I keep note of something good that has happened, and writing them on a little piece of paper, I store them in a jar on my bedside locker. Why? Because New Year's Eve has been reserved for false bitterness for far too long, and at least this time I'll have something positive to do: 364 positive messages to look at from things that happened throughout the day.

Could I ask for anything better on New Year's Eve 2013?