This year wasn’t a great year for the blog over all, at 39 posts since my last anniversary post, that’s less than a post per week, and that’s even ignoring the fact that 32 of those 39 were done as part of my post a day challenge last month (1 introduction post and then 31 daily posts). With 94 posts on the blog total, that makes this second year account for a bit over 41% of the posts on the blog (all stats not including this post right here).
On one hand, this blog is something I do for fun, it’s not my job, and I don’t make any money off it (any ads you may see/be blocking are wordpress ads because I am using their free site), so if I don’t feel like doing it, I don’t feel like doing it. On the other, I actually like having written APs of my gaming sessions, and like having my random gaming thoughts and ideas written down, and, presumably, you all like reading them. So it kind of bums me out that I’ve not been doing it.
I decided a while back that I wasn’t going to make excuses for not writing, 90% of the time it just boils down to simply… not doing it. I decide that playing video games or just browsing the internet is more interesting to do right at that moment. I showed just this last month that I can find time to write every day if I really motivate myself to. Blogging and talking about games is actually something I enjoy doing, I wouldn’t be doing this at all. It’s just something that takes more effort to do than passively watching something on youtube or whatever, and so even if I enjoy it my natural procrastination nature kicks in (also why I am combining the Post a Day review with the anniversary post). I’m not particularly happy with my output this year, but the only real solution is to make a conscious effort to write more… We’ll see if that happens.
As for the Post a Day Challenge itself… I’m actually really happy with how that turned out. I got 31 out of my 31 perfect posts up, with only two of them being late, and both of which still falling into the “Between getting up in the morning and going to bed at night” loose definition of “day”, just not the official “midnight to midnight” definition.
I’ll be honest… I half expected myself to miss a day around 9 or 10, and then just give up on the rest of the month. Part of why I explicitly worded my challenge in such a way that missing a day was not a “Fail” per se, just not quite ideal. All but like one or two of the posts were written the day of with only having done a few the day before and scheduling them for the next day to give myself an off day, and those were mostly “Wow this is long enough that I could split it up and not feel bad about it”, like my undead post about the Gulf, rather than doing that intentionally.
Many of the early posts WERE based on half-finished drafts I had lying around beforehand, which, honestly, one of my goals for doing that was to get the drafts that were still relevant published and out of my draft folder so I’m gonna rate that as a positive.
What I am not too happy about are the game theory editorials I used to fill space. I don’t think I necessarily disagree with any of the ideas I was TRYING to express, but normally that kind of post would have been written, edited, and re-written over several days to ensure I was actually saying what I meant and not digressing into unrelated topics. With only one day to write and edit, those probably weren’t really up to par. Maybe I’ll review and revise some of them one day, but for now I will just leave them as is.
I think my gulf posts, my play reports, and my general homebrew is probably all fine, obviously a lot of the stuff I posted didn’t have time to get playtested, but that’s sometimes true of stuff I post not of a schedule. I’m particularly glad a I got the Triforcebearer classes done, as last year’s anniversary post I mentioned them being done “soon”, so they’re long overdue.
Overall, I had a good time, but I am not 100% sure if I will do it again, the hardest part of the whole thing was coming up with an idea to post every day and next time I do it I’ll already have a lot more down the drain, but we’ll see.
Anyway, thanks to all of you who stuck with me, here’s to another year of blogging!
You All Meet in a Tavern 