The last day of the year is a traditional time to take stock of the successes and failures of the previous year.
How depressing!
I’m going to make it a little easier on myself by limiting the discussion to one category (blogging) and a shorter time period (December).
Taking stock of December
Back on November 29, I wrote about my blogging goals for the month of December. I intended to participate in one writing challenge (NaBloPoMo) and one photo challenge (Cricket Walker’s December V7N Photo Challenge). Results were mixed.
I succeeded in writing a blog post every day for the whole month. Yay, me!
I was less successful with the photo challenge, bailing after little more than a week. It wasn’t lack of desire, it was a combination of the unusual hectic holiday singing schedule, a run of unsafe-for-the-camera weather, and recurrent back pain that kept me inside in the recliner with my laptop instead of outside searching for interesting shots to match the photo challenge prompts.
Looking ahead to January
Writing every day wasn’t easy but, now that I’m in the habit, I’d like to keep going.
- I’ve signed up for BlogHer’s NaBloPoMo again for the month of January.
To spice things up a bit, I’m going to use a variety of sources for writing prompts. Most days, I expect I will be driven to write about something I read, some new bureaucratic idiocy, or something in the news. For days when nothing inspires me, or when there are too many ideas and not enough time to write about them all, I’m going to use these resources:
- NaBLoPoMo has its own set of daily writing prompts.
- Thursdays seem to be my brain-dead days. Since I plan to work through a rather long reading list this year, Third Sentence Thursday seems like a good way to combine the two goals.
- I’m intrigues by the possibilities of A River of Stones. I like the idea of mindfulness, of noticing one small thing each day. I may not write about each daily stone, but I’m going to keep eyes and mind and heart open to find them, and I’m going to spend at least a bit of time thinking about the stones I see.
- Some of the picture+question prompts at Thought Questions look interesting. I may use a few of them.
- Warning: When all else fails, I’ll tell cat stories.
