Halfway

Fifty days ago, on a whim, I began #The100DayProject with this post.  If my elementary math skills are functioning properly I believe tonight's post begins the second half of that #project.

Fifty blog entries in fifty days.  Some have been really good (find the one about prom) and some have been pretty short and lame (like this one will be!).  Some have been funny (my lawn grass is now twice as high as my neighbors'), some serious, and some indescribable (like the one about.....well, it's hard to describe).  I had a long series of coaching entries, have written quite a few about the outdoors,  at times have struggled to come up with a topic, other times have struggled to stay on topic.

Plenty of people don't "get" blogging.  I'm not completely sure I get it either.  Who am I writing to?  Why am I writing to them?  What, really, is the point in making myself do this every single day for fifty days?  For the first few weeks of this #project I was writing to almost nobody; I'm a stats guy, and the "views" stats for the posts in April are still pretty light (except for my dissertation on high school tennis).  During those weeks I struggled to find my voice, and my motivation, and asked myself the "why am I writing this?" question nearly every night.  But eventually I did find my voice along with the point of doing this every day: I like it.

Choosing topics is hard.  Finding a piece of time to use for this is hard.  Giving up other activities to do this activity every day is hard.  But the hard disappears once my fingers start tapping the keys, and after fifty days of doing this the only hard that's left is how hard it would be to break the habit of daily writing.  I have no plans of stopping when the next fifty days end, but.....

Soon I'll enter summer vacation; I want to shift my writing from late night to early morning, see if I can be more creative, maybe even more efficient, by writing in the a.m.  I wonder if I need a tighter focus on topics instead of the smorgasbord I've produced so far.  And if so, what might those fewer topics be?  The name of this blog, Natural Education, may need to change since I haven't written about education for a long, long time....and don't really want to anymore.  Most importantly, when do I make the move toward writing for a benefit other than personal pleasure?  As in, cash.  I've said it many times before - if I had a nickel for everyone who has told me I should write a book, I'd have a lot of nickels.  With each day, each entry, my writing habit grows stronger.....might I be propelling myself towards something bigger than late night ramblings about hosting house parties or morel mushrooms?

Probably not.

I know there's a slowly growing core group of faithful readers who take a look at what I write each day - thank you for that.  Here's hoping I can fill the next fifty days with something you'll enjoy reading....and that they don't fly by as fast as the first fifty!  Until tomorrow....thanks for reading.