The Not Goal

Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay

Towards the end of December I started thinking about what I am doing with this blog. 2021 is going to be a very different year for me, Corona related differences aside. I am planning to have a separate blog for my sailing adventure, one that my family, friends and school colleagues (and no doubt some enterprising students!) will be able to follow. I started blogging as a way to share my creative writing and later, my journey through the world of swinging. As my career changed so did my focus a little and my blogging took a bit of a back seat.

At the end of 2019 I re-energised my blogging and made a consistent effort to keep posting throughout 2020. I am pleased to say that the unspoken resolution of growing this page during 2020 has been achieved! Success was in not thinking of the whole resolution but in chipping away bit by bit.

I recently read an article written by my blogging hero, Marie Rebelle, at her new site Blogable. In this article she discussed ways to organise your blog to make it easier to navigate for readers. It got me thinking about my rambling pages and then exactly what I was trying to achieve. I don’t have a specific answer yet but something that has bugged me for a while is my tendency to start series and then kind of peter out. Howard and Lily being my most recent example.

This is NOT a resolution but I may need some accountability here. 2020 was the year of actually putting words on the screen. 2021 will be the year of making the words into a story that is longer than 1000 – 1500 words. I have looked at NoNoWriMo several times but, for southern hemisphere me, the month of November is the end of the school year. Only a teacher with suicidal tendencies and no need for sleep would commit to writing 50, 000 words in the same month as finalising assessment and reports for approximately 120 students!!

And so 2021 will be the year of making longer stories, maybe in fits and starts, but longer stories none the less. My plan is to do this in the same way as I did 2020. By not thinking about the whole goal but just chipping away quietly bit by bit. I have several thousand words in draft form sitting in various places including some new ones that have not seen the light of day. Maybe they will happen along sometime.

This post is part of Steeled Snake J is for January. To see who else is making New beginnings click here.