Two months ago, when I took on the challenge of writing 1,000 blog posts, I didn't honestly know how it would go. I've always loved writing, but it has been an off-and-on love affair. I'd go through stages of writing furiously for weeks and then months (or years) without writing anything beyond emails. Declaring this goal publicly gave me accountability I didn't have before, but that's not a guarantee of success, just an encouragement.
But here we are. Fifty posts in. I don't write every day, but I do write every week. Some days, like today, I'll write all five posts for the week in one 90-minute sprint. Other weeks, I'll spread the workload out over several days. I'm currently about two weeks ahead on posts (this was written on August 24th, for reference), which makes me feel really good—I don't have the sweaty, desperate pressure of having to come up with something every single day to write about, and if I have to take a few days or even a week off, I won't run out of content.
I worried in the beginning about having enough ideas, but that hasn't been an issue, either. I'll sit down to knock out one post and ideas just keep flowing. Usually, my time runs out before my inspiration does, which is a good feeling, too. I've had the opportunity to refine some of my ideas, to develop others, and to discard some that, once I got done writing a few hundred words about them, I was already sick of.
All in all, the experience of these first 50 posts has been wildly positive, a re-affirmation of my love of writing and a destruction of the preciousness I used to surround it with. I'm not focused on writing beautiful prose every day, so I'm less inhibited and having more fun with it. And the deadline pressure has sharpened my skills again, taking me back to my days in the newsroom, banging out copy before the paper went to print. It's been a blast, and I'm very much looking forward to the next 950.