Making challenges realistic

As regular readers will have noticed, my plan to write a blog post every day in August did not work very well. I managed to write on 13 out of 31 days, which is less than half. On the other hand, it is more than I have ever written in one month. Since my original target when I started the blog was to write 6-8 posts a month (which I sometimes achieve), I now think that 8-10 posts per month would be a more realistic target than writing every day.

Just as during the Camp NaNoWriMo challenge in July I did not manage to write every day, and had to make up my lost word count on other days, I found that trying to write every day was a bit demanding, especially as I had a busy workload during August.

My problem has always been that my work as a translator and editor takes up the same sort of creative verbal mental energy that my writing does, so at the end of a day's work, I find it difficult to spend even more time and energy crafting words and sentences, and often prefer to do something else. Since I don't intend to change my day job, I will have to find a way to combine my own writing ambitions with my paid work.

I often think of subjects for blog posts and then never get around to writing them. Now that I have my little netbook, it should be more convenient to write wherever I happen to be at the time. I have some books to review, and perhaps also some more controversial topics to discuss. I hope that with a more realistic expectation of how often I should write, I will be able to meet my new target and keep this blog interesting for my readers and myself.