Happy Third Anniversary

November 14 of 2013 was the starting point. Now, three years in, things was slowly starting to take shape. I figured a few things that was not working for me. Using a regular word processing software (Apple or PC) was not fun for me. It worked, sure. But it was not the streamlined process I wanted.

What I wanted was an easier way to track my progress and allow me to work faster on more ideas. Why more ideas? Well, not all stories were easy to craft for me. Not all ideas were easy to flush out. Plus, I wasn’t motivated to write every day. I wanted a way to come back to what I was working on and pick up where I left.

The traditional word processor was OK but not exciting. I have a lot of un-posted stuff as a result. At this stage of the game, I was OK with that. I was still learning and getting more interested in blogging.

Each year, turns out, I was posting a bit more than the prior year. By the close of the third calendar year…2015… I had shared 9 blog posts for nearly 5k words. Something clicked that year. Something started to make more sense to me. Clarity and focus started to come into being.

I stopped worrying so much about what others would think and started focusing a bit more on what I wanted to learn from writing. I started accepting my enjoyment of storytelling.

I also started exploring the back end of the site and how it worked. There were some tentative changes to how the blog looked. I was nervous of how folks would react. Thankfully, I didn’t pay vanity metrics a lot of mind. I didn’t have any real metrics to check then either.

By vanity metrics I mean things like how many likes you got or how many shares you got. By real metrics, I’m talking about conversions and things that leads to measurable results. I still don’t have those by the way… not yet.

this post is being shared retrospectively from the comfort of 2018

I’m not 100% sure… but… I believe this is the year I discovered the software Scrivener. Between Word, Evernote, Google, and Scrivener, I was adequately distracted by learning techniques to be worried about how folks were looking at my low post count in three years of writing.

I wanted to keep writing fun. I wanted to explore and try new things. I also wanted to eventually use this blog to showcase my photography. So, at the close of 2015, I made efforts to focus on one thing at a time. The primary focus would be story telling through the medium of blogging. Once I got a handle on that, it would be on to the next goal… writing on a regular basis.

This was the most pivotal point in my writing career. That choice to approach writing as an art with science as the engine… that changed everything. I’m hoping that approach will carry me through 2018 into 2019. But let me not get ahead too far… as this is supposed to be the 2016 anniversary post lol.