I Wrote for a Year and All I Got Was This Blog Post

Fun fact: I like to write ridiculous blog titles when I’m first drafting each post to get myself excited and beat writer's block by putting something on the page right away.

There are a lot of tiny habits like that I’ve picked up from the past year.

That’s right—I’ve been doing this for a year! 12 blog posts, the occasional Threads quip, and side-eye in the direction of LinkedIn with a hint of curiosity.

I’ve gone so much further with writing in the last year that I thought possible when I started. At first, I didn't plan to blog at all. I just wanted to launch a personal website.

Then I thought, “maybe I’ll write some articles here and there.” I didn’t commit to writing monthly until later. You can tell by the awkward 60-day gap in between my first two posts.

It’s been a long time since then. I own Total Escape Games now. The store migrated off Wix (finally) to WordPress, and I did a complete website redesign. I’m learning JavaScript frameworks like Vue.js and may end up rewriting this whole site.

Things are going well, and there’s a ton I’ve learned.

For example, hand-coding a website and trying to write blog posts on it at the same time is way more difficult than I thought. A blogging framework has tools in place to index your posts, let you write them in markdown, and myriad other options. It’s so nice.

By comparison, this is all vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript ES6. I’m hand-coding every single page with no shortcuts.

I coded it this way last summer as a learning experience, because I like to explore new skills from the bottom up and gain a strong understanding of the fundamentals. For that, I’m thankful I took the vanilla approach.

On the other hand, as I publish more and more posts, the website gets more difficult to maintain. I’m going to have to figure out a better long-term solution, and fast.

So, even if you have a background in software, it may be better to prioritize your writing by using a pre-buitd solution like Ghost, or at least a static site framework like Vue or React. You can even use Jekyl through GitHUb for something bare-bones to quickly get up and running. Just saying.

Vanilla isn’t the way, in my opinion, even though I’m glad I did it.

Writing is Unpredictable and Hard to Tame

I really love to write. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed the craft until I got into blogging.

It’s been years since I was in school, since I was a teaching assistant for 300-level composition. Since I wrote academic papers on Psychology and argumentative essays on current events.

Back then, I wanted to be an author and write novels. For a while I even challenged myself to write a new short story every month. I completed three National Novel Writing Months, and have tons and tons of story scraps all over my harddrive.

But between then and now, I took nearly half a decade away from the hobby.

Even if everything else was going terribly, I’d be thankful that blogging reconnected me with my love for writing.

I’m happy to say, though, that it’s not going terribly! I’ve written some posts I’m proud of, that delve deep into topics I’m an expert in, and that I hope are helpful to you when trying to navigate the tricky terrain of productivity or business ownership.

That said, I think I’ve been too loose about it the past few months.

When I first got into writing, I decided to let myself explore a broad range of topics and approaches. Short articles, long articles, teaching articles, opinion pieces, whatever. It was all fair game. That worked at first, because it let me feel things out.

But I think that freedom has made it hard to narrow things down, and often makes my life difficult when it's time to choose a topic each month.

I don’t know if it comes across, but I have about a billion different interests. It’s hard enough prioritizing them in my everyday life, let alone picking between them all for each blog post.

A lot of the time I think I choose poorly. Which isn’t to say my posts are bad, or that you shouldn’t read them (you should), but rather that some of the topics are boring. I’m realizing that if I’m bored writing them, you’re probably bored reading them. Even when they’re informative.

So, for the next year, I'm going to choose more interesting topics, or at least explore boring topics in an interesting way. I think I have more personality and creativity than I often put into words, and one of my weaknesses is getting that across over text.

It’s hard being vulnerable on the internet. Writing authentically, in my own voice, with my own ideas, is vulnerable. It’s something I’ve struggled with a lot in the past, and something I’m still working to overcome even on social media.

That’s my challenge to myself for the next year: write about things I care about in an interesting way with my personality showing through.

Art is Beautiful

Besides actually writing this blog, though, there’s so much more good that’s come from this habit, and that I’m thankful to have in my life.

The way life has felt for the last year is way different than how it felt before I had a writing outlet, and this consistency has led to tons of other healthy habits.

I journal pretty regularly these days. Sometimes those entries become Threads, or blog posts, or new tasks to accomplish at the store. It’s a great way to reflect and let my feelings out so I can review everything later and find the useful bits. It helps me unwind at night and let go of whatever’s been bouncing around in my head all day.

Writing is beautiful. It’s an amazing way to collect your thoughts and explore ideas.

I’m also doing art of different types again. Not just writing, but drawing, painting, photography, everything. It’s amazing.

It feels like, to some extent, my creativity has been unbottled. I've been so focused on business and growth and productivity for a long time now that I think I lost touch with my creative side. Writing has helped bring that back to me.

Plus, look, I’m a chatty person. Having an outlet for my thousands of words where I can explore ideas to my heart's content and publish them for you to enjoy makes me happy.

Rambling, But in a Good Way

I get off topic and tangent easily. Which is funny, because I’ve spent so much time doing research papers and technical writing that you’d think I’d be used to sticking to a narrow, rigorous scope when I write.

When you give me a blank page of a website for me to fill, though? Oh, man.

So, if you’re reading this, then thank you. It means a lot to me that you took time out of your busy life to read my long-winded ramblings. I hope some what I've shared so far has been helpful to you, and I'm glad you're here.

For next year, I’d like to double down.

More interesting posts. More thoughtful writing. More personality. More vulnerability. I want to keep delivering even better posts in an even more helpful way.

That’s what I’ve learned from the past year, and what I’d like to reinvest into the next one. Writing interesting and authentic articles is damn hard. That's undeniable. But I've realized when it gets hard is when it’s the most worth leaning into something.

I’ve written a lot in the past, and I always took a break around that point, and that's a shame. Because I think all the best gains and best experiences in life come after scaling that wall.

So, I better get climbing.