Daily Journaling

A few years ago I signed up for a service called 750Words.com after I reading a post from an author who mentioned that it had helped her get better about writing every day. It’s a very simple service with a blank page for you to write in daily and a word counter at the bottom. If you put 750 words into it before midnight then you get a check for the day, and there’s a string of boxes at the top of the page showing you how many times you’ve succeeded at that for the month. The writing isn’t published anywhere, and it has a $5 a month subscription fee.

I only wrote a couple of days that first year. I wrote even less the following year, and the year after that. I kept meaning to though and I didn’t cancel the subscription as I figured it would spur me to start making use of the site. In 2018 I decided that I needed to either use it or cancel it. I missed 15 days that first month, but even with that I’d still written more on there than I had in the previous three years. In February I only missed 4 days, and in March I managed to get my first month without missing a day. I missed 1 in April, 4 in May, and then started to trail off for the remainder of the year skipping July and missing most of the remaining months.

What I started doing in 2018 was not trying to get in a creative writing session, instead I just started writing whatever was in my head even if it was just, “I don’t know what to write,” over and over again. Usually after a minute of that my mind would start to wander and I’d end up starting to write about my day or about what I was planning for the next day. This surprised me by turning out to be very useful. Yet I still ended up extending my break well into 2019 until September.

I realized I was missing the chance to process what had happened during the day and mentally prepare myself for the next day. So I decided to get back to the daily habit again. This time specifically for the daily journaling and not to help me become a writer or get back into blogging like I’d planned previously. Which is ironic since it did lead me back to blogging last year.

I’ve had a couple of evenings where I haven’t sat down until 11:30 pm to write but it generally doesn’t take me more than 15 or 16 minutes to hit my 750 word goal and get that check mark for the day. I always feel good after I do it. In fact some days I start out in a bad or down mood thinking it wasn’t a good day or very productive or there’s something else that’s bothering me, but as I summarize the day’s events, I often realize there were things that went well which I’d forgotten about, and finish feeling better about the day than when I started.

Since September of 2019 I’ve only missed 1 day in October. I’m not sure if I’ll make it through all of 2020 without missing a day, in fact I would imagine I’ll end up missing at least a couple just because things happen like being sick or going on vacation. I am sure I’ll end the year with more months without any missed days than with them.

When I did get back into blogging last year, I was briefly tempted to try to write my drafts there to get my check mark for the day and then copy over to the blog. But I just found that doing free writing about my day worked so much better there, and it helped to clear my head and get me in the writing frame of mind. There’s been a couple of instances where coming into a Sunday evening I had no idea what I wanted to post about, and after getting my 750 words in for the day, I suddenly had an idea and I could go into WordPress and just go.

The service has been a great help to me personally and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants or needs to get a little positive feedback on hitting a daily word goal.

Back again.

It’s been a while, four years actually, since my last post celebrating the end of my seventh year on the blog. Obviously my plans at the time to set a writing reminder and do one or two posts a week didn’t succeed.

What started as one of my normal slow gaps turned into a January where I didn’t have much to say about the last years games or upcoming games and just went on from there. Not just with the blog either but my time on Twitter dropped off in the last few years too. I’d find myself browsing Reddit much more often when I had some time to kill. Eventually I started using Instagram a bit as well, but it seemed like any time I would check in on Twitter that were a lot of conversations going on that I didn’t have anything to contribute to or were over hours before I was reading them.

MMO’s have always been one of the primary drivers for getting me to write, and were the reason why I started the blog in the first place. So once my interest in MMO’s dwindled to logging into Star Trek Online occasionally, the main driver for me to go online and write was gone. There’s such a time commitment required and getting back up to speed in an MMO after an absence often seems like learning a new game, that I’d never play for long.

So, why am I back now?

I’ve started to write posts like this two or three times over the last four years, but I always came up with some excuse and put it off. Recently I’ve been back on Twitter more and feeling more engaged in the online conversations. I’ve also gotten into flying quadcopters over the last ten months, and I’ve been wanting to write about my experience of getting into that hobby. It’s not the kind of thing that fits into a tweet no matter what the character limit is up to now.

The other big motivator was my original site host was acquired by a company I try to avoid, and my hosting plan was coming up for renewal. So I needed to decide if it was time to just shut the site down or I should put the effort into finding a new host and migrating the site over.

Of course, it remains to be seen how it goes, but I have some ideas already and I’m hoping I can capitalize on my productive bursts to get a buffer of posts scheduled. Since I’m primarily planning to write about my adventures in FPV drones, I can work ahead as much as I’d like.

Seven!

Today marks the end of the seventh year of the blog. I say this every year, but it’s crazy to me that the blog is still around after so long. Of course just like last year, my posting has been sparse outside of Blaugust, so the blog is really barely around. I’m at the point now where it’s nice to have an outlet when I need one, but I don’t feel guilty when I look at the site and see it’s been four months since I wrote anything.

I’m not saying that I expect to fall silent until next year though. I’ve got a weekday reminder to write something set on my phone and that has worked more often than it hasn’t in September. My hope and my goal is to keep that up with two or more posts a week depending on what I’m doing and how much I have to say. If nothing else I expect to have regular KSP mission reports.

Thanks to everyone who’s stopped by to read or comment, I’m looking forward to seeing what the next year brings.

Blaugust 2015 Wrapup

blaugust_2015_logoGoodbye Blaugust, hello Restember! Well hopefully not.

Yesterday marked the end of another successful Blaugust. Thirty-one posts in as many days. Unlike last year when I apparently hit a speedbump after the first week, this year I didn’t start to struggle with topics until around the 12th or 15th. Even then, I just stopped worrying about having a topic and just started writing and figured a topic would show up. Some times it did. Some times it did not. That for me, was really the point this year. I basically relearned last year’s less of “just write and publish” don’t worry “is it ready.” That’s not to say I published anything I wouldn’t normally publish, it’s more that I would’ve just not sat down to write or I would’ve saved it as a draft thinking I needed to come back and proof it, and then deleted it three months later.

My favorite thing about Blaugust this year besides just getting back in the habit of writing, has been the success of my multitasking experiment over the last week and a half. Needing something to write about daily, and having a bout of nostalgia for a couple of games that I always mean to get back to, gave me the push I needed to finally pick LotRO and Champions back up. Even better is the fact that I’ve seen other people get interested in those games as a result of posting about it here.

Last year, I trailed off in September posting eleven times in the first half of the month. Then only twice in October and nothing until January. Unfortunately, it seems like if I’m going to be consistent, I have to do it every day. That certainly has been true for Blaugust, and was also trued for me during Nanowrimo. But daily blogging full-time feels like a huge commitment. Weekends especially are difficult to make sure I sit down and write. It might be enough if I schedule a daily task in my organizer that just runs Monday to Friday, but I think that’s what I want to try starting out, along with a reminder to check in on the blog and see how I’ve been doing after a few weeks.

Almost There

Blaugust 2015 Day 16

Guilt and Joy

About two or three Saturdays a month since March, I’ve been heading down to my local gaming store and playing Golem Arcana. Usually I feel a little guilty because I’m gone for about five hours and leaving my wife to deal with Thing 1 and Thing 2 solo. This weekend though, my dad was taking Ting 1 for the day, and Thing 2 is much easier to handle without his older brother winding him up. So I was able to have a nice guilt-free wargaming visit yesterday.

I got three games in, didn’t win any off them but they were still fun. Afterwards while we were packing up and chatting I realized that everyone was thrilled to be there and playing. It seemed like a stark contrast to what I usually see in MMO forums and chat.

So far the only downside to being part of an active group is that it has finally pulled me into using Facebook regularly. I’ve had an account for years but used it very little, like nearly never.

Blaugust Midpoint

August is now half gone, and while I’ve had a few days that were tough for me to get something written overall I’ve been totally happy with my writing. I have seen posts from some people that aren’t joining the event or have already dropped out. It’s understandable. I’ve certainly considered it myself a few times, especially when I sit down and think I’ve got nothing to say. But for me, that’s really the point of this. I start writing and after getting a few hundred words of drivel out of the way, something usually comes out that I didn’t realize that I’d been thinking about. I find that experience pretty cool.

So if you’re participating and worried you run out of steam now that we’re halfway through, I think you should look at it as a good thing. It’s a chance to see what happens when you sit down and just start typing. Even if you don’t actually post it.

 

Six years.

Wow, I can’t believe that I’ve been blogging for six years. I don’t stop to appreciate it much, but even though I don’t blog regularly in any sense of the word, I need to cut myself a little slack for maintaining a blog for six years, no matter how sporadically I post. And it’s definitely been sparse outside of Blaugust. Speaking of, I haven’t kept up with the “post every day” thing, but I hadn’t intended to anyway. I have been getting one or two in a week though which has been great. After looking at my archives, I don’t think I’ve been this motivated to post since 2011.

Anyway, I wanted to send out a big “Thank you!” to everyone who stops by to read and comment. Onward to year seven!

Blaugust Finale

Today’s the last day of Blaugust. I’m pleased to say I haven’t missed a day, which around the 7th or 8th I wasn’t sure I would be able to manage. In part I think it just took a few weeks to knock the rust off of the mental gears needed to post something everyday, but it was also a matter of having the courage to cover more personal topics than I usually do. a final piece fell into place around the middle of the month when I stopped worrying so much about “was it ready” and got to the point where I started to think “good enough, publish it.”

This last change was the most valuable part of Blaugust for me. I have long had a bad habit of writing up a rant or opinion piece on whatever the current big issue was in the MMO space and then saving it as a draft with the intention of coming back the next day to proof it and then publish it. Except I rarely ever came back to it the next day. Writing provides enough of an outlet that I don’t have the same need to get it published unless I do it right when I’m done.

I know a lot of bloggers struggled this month and maybe it’s because I’ve been doing this on and off for years. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been through the NaNoWriMo experience a few times and that was much more difficult. But I really enjoyed this and having a daily deadline was necessary motivation for me. I hope either Belghast or someone else takes up the idea next year.

Beyond the writing challenges and growth that I’ve enjoyed this month, I’ve also enjoyed the community aspects. I’ve added a few new blogs to the blogroll and my RSS reader, and picked up some new friends and followers on Twitter.

Thanks Belghast!

Day 31 of Blaugust

Year five?!

This has been, by far, the roughest year for me with blogging. I’ve been on a hiatus of sorts since April and only last week really started to feel the need to start writing here again. Really I don’t feel like I’ve missed too much as far as topics or news. It seems like it’s been a really quiet year overall for MMOs. Not that I’ve really been playing them anyway. I had a brief stint with Defiance before I got burned out on the clunky UI and severe lack of any social environment in the game. I also spent quite a bit of time with Star Trek Online this year, Cryptic did extremely well with their Romulan expansion, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t actually like Romulans much. No, what I’ve been spending most of my time playing this year has been Minecraft, specifically modded Minecraft. I mentioned back in April that I’ve found the Feed the Beast mod pack and since then have move on to customizing my own mod pack.

Anyway, I want to thank anyone that’s still stopping by to see if I’ve gotten off my lazy butt to write, and hopefully you’ll be hearing more from me for the rest of the year. It’s best not to make any promises, but I will say that I’ve finally managed to get into Dwarf Fortress after many failed attempts and that it’s unique among the single player games I’ve experienced in that it makes me want to write about the events that happen in the game. Beyond that, I’ve recently dropped back into Champions Online for more than a brief check in, so you all might finally see origin stories for a few more of my heroes like what I did for the Silver Hunter.

Thanks for reading.

Four years, almost missed it.

On Friday as I was leaving work, I looked at the calendar on my phone to see if anything was planned for the weekend and saw that Sunday was my blog’s anniversary. I nearly missed it.

I hadn’t realized that it’s been almost exactly a month since my last post, but I guess it’s not that surprising to anyone who follows me on Twitter. Things usually get quiet around here when I’m in the obsessive honeymoon stage of a game affair. For most of the past four weeks that’s been Guild Wars 2, but the last few days have also seen Torchlight 2 take up some of my game time.

I keep intending to sit down and write up all of the notes I’ve been taking while playing GW2 but I always end up playing instead, which is a bit of a review in itself. Obviously I need to work more on easing up on the self-editing.

Anyway, thanks to everyone that’s stuck around over the last twelve months to read my ramblings and leave comments. Even after four years I always get excited when I see an email saying there’s a new comment.

Wow, three years.

Today marks three years of blogging!

I have to say, I never expected to still be writing this long. I hoped I would be, but I don’t think I actually believed it. I’ve lost count of the number of abandoned writing project I’ve started over the years and despite my best intentions, a part of me didn’t expect this endeavor to be any different.

Like I did last year, I wanted to mention a few numbers (for my own reference later on if no other reason). I’ve published 309 posts and 1,724 comments (doubling last years numbers for both). My Red Dead Redemption post is still the most popular post on the site by a ridiculous margin (7,674 hits versus 1,170 for a Minecraft post) and I wish I knew why. My final hit count for 2010 was 21,939 (up from the YTD of 12,284 on last year’s anniversary), and 2011 has already busted that at 23,177.

Not bad for someone who vacillates between daily rambles to sporadic rants.

I wanted to send out a special “Thank you!” to the people who stop by regularly an leave comments: MMOGamerchick, Yeebo,  Anjin, Longasc, xXJayDuBXx,  Tesh, and Rowan. While the recognition is nice, it’s the chance to engage in conversations that I really enjoy.

Thanks for reading.