13.31 A (Half) Year of Activity - DONE!!

I just finished a yearly project. Each day of the month I posted on a pre-determined theme. During the month of November, I'll post a collage of all my photos on the daily theme from the past year. The theme for the thirty-first day of the month was "Activity."

****************

2022 Reading Stats - I would be broke if it weren't for the beauty of public libraries. 
Baking - I mostly successfully made lemon bars.
Writing Daily - Ha ha ha. I am so excited that this little experiment is coming to a close. 
A Little of This, A Little of That - This is when I first did a straw poll to see if anyone wanted to do a reread of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn with me. The very early stages of the Cool Bloggers Book Club!
Sunday Chore Day - I legitimately walked you through the chores I did. I'm SO SORRY. I had to write something every day. 
Scribe It - Interesting idea, but it didn't work for my needs. 
NaBloPoMo 2023 - We did it!

****************

Book count: 2

Sign count: 1

Food count: 1

****************

Draped Reclining Figure by Henry Moore (bronze, 1952-1953, cast 1956)

This is a very celebratory post for me. Not only have we all survived NaBloPoMo, but my half-baked project to blog every day for a year is finally over. You can heave a sigh of relief that I will never again be posting multiple times a day! Woot woot! (I am lying. I did this exact same thing in 2014-2015, so maybe in another decade I'll do it again.)

Here are some lessons I've learned over the course of this project.

1) I can write something every day. It doesn't have to be witty or even particularly GOOD, but it's possible to write something every day. The beauty of posting every day is that if you write something mediocre, it's replaced by something newer the next day. The opposite of that is also true, though; sometimes you write something that is smart and gets lots of engagement and it is also replaced the next day. 

2) The hardest part, for me, is not the writing. It's coming up with the ideas about what to say. Sure, I might notice that there are a lot of PopTarts or that the sidewalks are messed up, but what do I say about them?  Where are all these ideas supposed to come from, anyway? 

3) Some themes were more helpful than others. For example, the theme "Moment" was so flexible that using it as a prompt was pretty easy. But the theme "Failure" felt limiting and negative.  Perhaps I should have considered the reusability of the prompts more at the beginning of the project, but I did not, so sometimes I had to get creative.

4) As I've talked about before, these prompts did start to overtake my life a little bit. If anyone so much as said the word "safety" or "decision" or "contact" in my vicinity, my ears would perk up and I would be much more interested than I really should have been. 

5) It is true, isn't it, that a big project is just a series of little projects? When I published my first hat post, it all seemed very daunting. But each post on its own wasn't that time consuming, although I hesitate to even think about the total number of hours I spent on it.

6) This came at a great time in my life. For most of the length of the project, I was either unemployed or underemployed and I was feeling adrift. This did give me structure to my life AND a community of people who supported me even when I wrote about very mundane things like my linen closet, how I do laundry, what's in my curio cabinet, or how I track goals. My readers have given me good advice, made fantastic recommendations, and just generally connected me to the human race.

****************

Don't worry. I have a book review coming out tomorrow.

****************

Congrats to all the people who completed NaBloPoMo! Thanks to everyone who commented regularly! Thanks to San for organizing all of it like the badass she is.

****************

What are you blogging plans for December? Anyone up for a 31/31 days of posting?  (No, not me.)