Yeah! High five, guys! Come on, throw those hands up! Whoop! Yeah! It’s time to celebrate! Two weeks ago I decided to try a write a blog post every day for a month and we’re half-way there! I was putting off doing any meta-blogs: blogs about blogging itself. But I figure the half-way point is a good time to let it all hang out and kick back by being a bit self-referential. I mean, hey, we all like to be a bit self-referential on special occasions, don’t we?

So far, I have been enjoying doing the blog. I feel like I am being creative and doing things on my own terms.

I am not really laying down the rules in terms of trying to find a specific subject for the blog, as I should do if I was aiming for a bigger audience. I’ve even stopped advertising new blogs over the past week or so via twitter and social media. Because the point of this, at the moment, is to use it as a daily practice to find out what I am capable of writing, what I enjoy writing, and the subjects I might want to cover.

Things I have learnt which may be of use to other bloggers:

• Writing takes time. The daily deadline means I will write something passable and post it up. But it might be three or four days later before I have gone back and ironed out all the typos, added links, formatting, etc. I am really posting up notes or ideas and I might have better understanding of what I was trying to say several days later. For example, the “Bored” entry was actually inspired by the idea that people, when they are bored, Google “I am bored”. And if I wrote this post, they would find it. That thought should have been included in the post and might have made it much more interesting. So I am now very tempted to go back and substantially change it. All of this indicates I need to have started a post several days before posting it. And have a “lead in time”.
• I have certain times of the week that are better for writing than others.
• I have cheated twice by (1) reblogging a Charity Chuckle blog (2) putting up an infographic. In my defence, they obey the rules by having words and pictures, and they were both experiments into trying something new. But they weren’t a little crafted piece.
• I get annoyed when I think that I am submitting stuff that is not up to my own standards. Though I do it because to submit nothing one day would spoil what I am trying to do. It is about being forced to provide quantity and quality on time. And about daily practice.
• Sometimes my own writing annoys me and I realise that I am “not all that” as a writer, but again this is the point of the exercise: to push me into wanting to be better by practice and learning.
• I need to plan further forward and have articles “in the bag” for when I am uninspired or busy.
• I need to organise all my files, and keep a log of ideas I can look at for inspiration.
• I am enjoying trying new things, like very short stories.

So there we are. I look forward to continuing for the next couple of weeks!

By the way, I actually started to write this blog post a few days ago when I had more time. So I guess I am starting to learn something!

How’s that for self-reference?