Plans for my blogs

Once upon a time, I had a healthy network of my own personal blogs.  I had perhaps half a dozen that I updated regularly, almost daily, and one in particular (my wedding blog) that earned me some nice pocket change in ad revenue.

I miss those days.  I miss the pocket change too, but I especially miss the blogging community.  It's been replaced with other social media, of course, and probably more easily monitored social media if we want to be honest, but I miss the writing aspect of blogging over other outlets such as Facebook.

Mostly I've just been too busy to blog, but that's a sorry excuse because blogging doesn't really take all that long.  My posts are typically fairly short (yesterday's long-winded post notwithstanding), and they give me an opportunity to write in my own voice (a rarity for a freelance writer, especially one who writes blog posts and web copy for others).  It's also a good task for "warming up," which I used to be big on back in the day that I spent more time working from home -- I would check email, spend some time looking for new clients, and then blog before buckling down on client work.

I miss those days, especially since I feel like I was better at regulating my schedule back then.  I feel like that has gone downhill too, probably partly because I'm busier and my schedule varies so much anymore -- the time I have available changes so much now that it's hard to portion out time for tasks such as email, marketing, and blogging.  Anymore, I just have to do things as I can, particularly client work -- which I always have a backlog of these days.

Anyway, to get back to my original point: NaNoWriMo for me this year is an attempt to get back to those habits.  So instead of a novel or even a single writing project, my goal is to put out the word count each day on an assortment of my own projects.  Plus I'm counting pictures in my word count this year, using the maxim "a picture is worth a thousand words," primarily because several of my blogs use pictures and they take time to set up and take.

I've tried the smorgasbord of projects before without much success, but with my new blogs, a couple other writing projects I'm excited about, and the new picture rule, I'm hoping it will far better for me this year.  And so far so good: I've spent the weekend ahead of par.  The real test will be not only whether I can maintain it during the week, on the days where I am my busiest, but also whether I can use it to create new habits that will last beyond November.

Lasting habits is, after all, always my goal for November, but probably also the hardest goal to achieve, far more difficult than 50,000 words in a month!