These writing posts from 2021 are meant to be my warm-up writing for the more serious stuff I am doing, and saving for writing contests, potential submissions for publication, and so on, where I can’t have them published online first. These posts have also served habit formation, where I incentivize myself to do something, and get some reward for it to want to do it again until I do it without thinking, for about six weeks as typical habit formation takes. Finally, they serve as practice writing fodder. In development from a poor level to start, there are going to be a lot of “garbage” that will have to be produced on the way to improvement. There has to be. You can’t gradually improve from 1 to 10 without putting out pieces of quality level 1, 2, 3, etc. before you get to 9 and 10. Well, it’s been six weeks, so how are things coming along?

With regards to habit formation, I’ve got the habit down now in daily routines on various days, balanced with other things going on in my life. I’ve got the “habit” down so well that I can probably treat it as a work ethic “habit” rather than a “writing” habit, where I can swap out writing for other hobbies like sewing, painting, among others. If so, I’ll be posting less frequently than daily, but you can be sure to see posts on more topics, although it’s not like I’m short on topics when it comes to imagination. Short topics are a bit more of a challenge if I didn’t want to write a ton of words each night for “warm-up” (minimum 500 words), as many things I think about is more on the scale of 1500 or more words. Just look at the word counts of posts I’ve made since January 1, 2021, in this streak and see.

With regards to warm-up, it’s almost going too well that I don’t feel like I need to warm-up nearly as much as I did in early January. In fact, on some days, this feels like a bit of a chore to have to get out of the way so I can get to my real writing!

With regards to writing quality, it’s my judgment call, but I definitely feel like I am doing a lot better serious writing when I am putting in the work and focus, which I don’t always do here, especially if I’m feeling like I’m just trying to get it out of the way. Perhaps a more telling indicator of how well it’s been going, though, has been the number of posts that I’ve started, but pulled because I saw potential for it to be contest material. There have been six, all in February, which has given me a nice “quiver” of entries for a variety of contest types, whether fiction or nonfiction, really short like less than 1000 words or longer at up to 5000 words. That’s a pleasant change from just a month ago when I was struggling with what can I write about, or can I fit that into the word range?

So at this point, I’ll probably continue posting almost daily for at least this week, if not until the end of February. After that, we’ll see, but know I’ll still be writing lots, just not sharing immediately. Once the more serious writing has had its chance in a contest or two, I will post it here, unless it wins and gets published somewhere… but let’s not get ahead of myself. One step at a time. Enter a few contests where I can get feedback, and work on that to be in better contention in the future.

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