Inspired to write

I’ve been fairly busy lately. With university lectures, the upcoming exam period, and an ongoing university project taking up most of my time. I just felt a little stressed and exhausted.

Coming back to writing blog posts has always been a plan of mine, although seeing that my last post was two months ago, I’m obviously not that good at it.
Writing stuff down and thinking about how best to express myself when writing about a specific topic is something I find calming and relaxing - a welcome distraction, especially these days.

Originally, this post was meant to be the first post, in a series of many, in which I announced, that I would be trying to complete 100 Days To Offload.
But when planning what posts I could write and the kind of schedule I’d be working with, I decided that it would put too much pressure and stress on me. And the last thing I want is to publish rushed, unfinished posts that I’m not happy with.
I get that 100 Days To Offload isn’t about writing perfect, long format posts, and more about just writing - a lot of the posts from other people I’ve seen, aren’t actually that long.
It just felt like it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

Turns out, I’m also not good at keeping a habit. I just find it really stressful to know that I have to do this one thing, and I have to have it done by a specific date - especially when I’m working with a tight schedule.
Arguably, that is me stressing myself about something I don’t have to do - I mean, nobody is forcing me to write anything. But most of the time, when I take a day off, it ends with me taking more days off, or dropping the thing entirely because, well I’ve already ruined my streak, so I might as well take it slow.

Yet, I still wanted something that motivates me to keep going, just on a less tight schedule. At first, I considered not trying to finish 100 Days To Offload, but to be honest I think that would end with me just stopping at some point.
Which is why I decided to look around for an alternative.

And look around I did: Whilst looking at posts tagged with #100DaysToOffload, I was reminded of WritingMonth.

Pick your own goal that best challenges you and write your novel, short stories, poems, stage or screen play, blog posts, or any other writing project as part of a growing community of writers.
- taken from the WritingMonth website

Sounds like fun? Well, that’s what I thought. A community of people who love to write, being able to set my own custom goals, just what I need to keep going.
The idea behind WritingMonth is easy: You sign up and choose a username, which can be used to access your profile page. After you log in, you can create projects and assign goals for a given month.

Initially, I wanted to set my goal to 4 blog posts per month, but I decided that setting the goal in words would grant me the freedom to focus on longer posts without failing to meet the goal. (Because longer posts might take more time to write and thus might prevent me from finishing four posts per month.)
To figure out the best target, I had a look around my older blog posts and found that most of my posts average between 800 and 1200 words. Since I still want to try to publish about 4 posts per month, I set the goal to 4096 (I think it is more interesting than 4000, and also it is 2^12, which is cool, I guess?).

We’ll see how that goes. I might have to adjust it in the future if I find that it is too high or low.
For now, I’ll have to digitalize this post. I wrote it by hand on paper, which, to be honest, is really relaxing and less distracting than writing on my computer. It also prevents my headache from getting worse, so that is a plus.

Either way, this will count as my first post this month. At least one more to come.

I still have my list of topics I planned for 100 Days To Offload; I already decided against some of them - but I’m really excited about the remaining ones. Not sure if I’ll write about all of them, but there is some really cool stuff on there; you’ll just have to wait and see.

See you around 👋