The end of the streak

I’d been riding a twenty-two day streak in my “five hundred words a day” challenge, including some days when I found it really hard to sit down to actually write. That streak is over, unfortunately, although it’s “sort of” and “not really” and “darn it, I was doing so well.”

It’s not really over, because I actually did write more than five hundred words yesterday, and published them, too; I just didn’t publish them here, and I didn’t record that I’d published them, either. I remembered too late; I record that I’ve written my five hundred words as part of the publishing process, and since I didn’t follow the publishing process here, I didn’t record that at least I’d written enough to fulfill the challenge.

So: the streak is dead, officially, even though I actually did fulfill my writing assignment for the day (and, at word one hundred and fifty or so in this post, I’ve actually exceeded my assignment by a lot for today, too.)

In a way, this is actually a good thing. I didn’t even think about having written at least five hundred words, because it’s been pretty normal for me over these last few weeks. Sure, I didn’t fulfill my own rules concerning the assignment (publish, publish here, no editing except for inline mistakes caused by poor/rapid typing, record the publication) but that’s okay.

I’m not a slave to the assignment, I hope.

And it’s nice to think that it’s become normal enough again that publishing isn’t much of an event. I used to publish three or four things a day – shorter things, I guess (averaging around two hundred words each), five days a week, fifty plus weeks a year (I occasionally took a week off or so), but over the last few years I’ve been in a sort of resting state.

I wish I could edit that last sentence! I’d rewrite it as “I’ve been in a resting state over the last few years, after publishing multiple pieces every workday for years, with only occasional breaks.” Wait, does this count as “editing?”

I guess I felt like I’d more or less done my bit for creating content for a while, and it wasn’t really important for me to be heard, or read, all that much. So publishing light content every few months was enough to satisfy any need I had to write for public consumption. (I still write a lot for my own enjoyment, but much of it’s for internal interest only.)

So the writing challenge – which continues, by the way, for at least another few days – has been very, very useful. It’s kickstarted me back into writing regularly, and even if the writing isn’t stellar or particularly topical, at least it’s writing – you don’t ride a horse like a master on day one, you have to ride every day.

And that’s what this has been, and what it remains. It’s a lot of fun.