Halfway There. Day 50 of the 100 Days of Writing Challenge
Halfway There. Day 50 of the 100 Days of Writing Challenge
My challenge of writing for 100 Days has been quite a ride so far, I wrote 50 posts and about 20000 words, covered various subjects like book reviews, startups, business, self-improvement, history, neuroscience, cryptography, reading lists and haikus.
I've written most of those 20000 words in March, I have quite a lot of posts about 900+ and 1000+ words long. In April however, I started slowing down but I kept going, I "cheated" a bit by creating short cryptography challenges, reading lists with my favorite books and three lines long haikus. I slowed a bit with writing on my blog because I'm quite busy lately and I'm also questioning if it's worth writing long, interesting, value adding and time-consuming blog posts because almost nobody reads them.
I hope that you like haikus because long posts or not, I'm determined to finish this challenge even if that means writing most of the next 50 posts as haikus.
I've started doing series lately in order to bring more structure and order to my posts; my first posts where about all kinds of subjects, I didn't do much planning and I din't knew about what I will write until a few minutes before starting.
The first series that I started doing is about decision making:
How Much Analysis of Outcomes is too Much Analysis?
How Much Analysis of Outcomes is too Much Analysis? Part 2
I continued with a series with cryptographic challenges. These little cryptography challenge where fun to make and didn't took much time to do them, one hour at most, compared to one to three hours for a lengthier post.
Decrypt This Post, Difficulty Level: Easy
Cryptographic Fun No. 3: Deus Vult!
Islands, Pirates and Treasures: Cryptographic Challenge No. 4
The Pharaoh Sails to Orion: Cryptographic Challenge No. 5
Four Brain Cells Cryptography: Les Shadoks
Continued with reading lists:
My Top Fiction Books – Reading List
My Top Books on Startups – Reading List
My Top History Books – Reading List
My Top Marketing Books – Reading List
My Top Mind & Neuroscience Books – Reading List
My Top Business Books – Reading List
My Top Biography & Autobiography Books – Reading List
My Top Psychology Books – Reading List
And then haikus:
Ask the Wind, Ask the Dust – Haiku
Artificial Intelligence – Haiku
A Neighborhood Walk in the Spring – Haiku
Three things that I learned so far:
- Somewhere around day 20 I started worrying about running out of subjects to write about. Well, the number of subjects that you can write about is virtually infinite, your only limitation is your imagination and your creativity.
- One thing that I do in order to remember about what I want to write is to create a draft post, an empty draft post with nothing in it but the title. At some point I had about 20 or more of such drafts, I still have a lot of drafts waiting to be transformed into full fledged posts.
- It's important to start; this step can also be the hardest. Even if you feel like writing or not, muster enough will to write a title and a paragraph. Most of the time you won't stop there and continue writing until you finish the post.