Updates and thinking ahead

 Hi. My name is Joe. It's been eight days since my last blog.

It would be easy to look back to the middle of the month when, on October 12th, I said I was starting a blog streak that I hoped would go on for a long, long time and see the past eight days, and the four before that when I didn't blog, as a failure. It would be easy to look back to October 5th, when I started a short story and a goal of writing at least 1000 words of fiction a day, and then consider the sixteen days of the month since when I have written neither fiction nor blog and call the month a total and complete failure.

It's not.

It's October 29th. This month, I've written five blogs. Six if you count this one.

I've managed to write non-blog writing, both fiction and non-fiction, on five days, totaling 5549 words.

That's six blogs and 5549 words more than I wrote last month. Or the month before. Hell, it's five blogs and 5549 more words than I've written all year, I think. I probably started something in January, but I don't remember and have no evidence to support that theory. 

If I did blog, I deleted those blogs out of embarrassment. Out of a feeling of failure. I probably set goals, did not meet them, and erased the evidence that any of it ever happened. 

Looking at this blog, the first posted entry now is from June 5th of this year. Which is sad, since this blog is probably close to a decade old, if not more. I don't know how to check the born on date, and I'm not going to stop writing in the middle of the blog to do so, but there should be a smattering of entries, sometimes for a month or more at a time, sometimes scattered in clusters over the course of years. I'm sure I've posted here over a hundred times. I'd guess it's closer to two-hundred fifty. Maybe more. That's not a lot, when you consider a daily blogging habit, but it's something. And I've erased every bit of it before June 5th of this year. 

That's a shame. There was some good writing in there.

Again, its easy enough to paint all that as failure.

But I'm not going to do that to myself anymore. Not if I can help it, anyway.

Six blogs is a win. It's six more than last month. Same for 5549 words. Same for that post from June that somehow survived my ritual purges. All wins. All improvement over my usual habit of quitting and deleting, of running away and trying to erase my failures. 

It's a mindset shift, and an important one. 

It takes failure to get to success. It takes trying, and failing, to learn what it takes to be successful and eventually reach your goals. My habit of completely restarting has been sabotaging that process. It's one thing to fail, reset, to take a step back, reassess, and get back on the horse. That's a lesson learned. That's a path to success. What I've been doing is restarting, almost completely, and while that has taught me something, (mostly, that it gets me nowhere and feels terrible), it is self-sabotaging in the extreme.

So no more going backward. It's full speed ahead from here on out, and whether the ship is functioning at 100% and going warp speed, or 1% and struggling to get out of the harbor, I'm always going to be moving towards my goals.

So, there are three days left in the month, including today. My goal is to blog all three of those days, write a little fiction all three days, and set my goals for November. 

On the fiction front, I started a story based on a silly idea back on the 5th of this month, and the story is going nowhere fast. It's more of a amusing anecdote. I've been tempted to trash it and move on to something else, but of all the bad writing habits I have, abandoning a story in the middle and trashing it is by far the worst. I could write 5000 words a day for eternity, but if I don't break that habit, I'll never get anywhere. So, whatever it takes, I'm going to finish that story by the end of the month.

If I'm really brave, I might even do a quick revise and send it out. It's high time I started the age old writer's tradition of collecting rejection slips.

Anyway, I'm here. I'm writing. I'm blogging. And I'm embracing small victories. How are you?

See you tomorrow.