Sunday, November 26, 2023: Weekly Writing Intentions Revised

Where I examine the purpose behind this weekly post, and decide to go in a slightly new direction.

Daily Diary, Day 1181:

As we head into the last month of 2023, I am starting to think about a year-end roundup, as well as setting some goals for the next year. In doing so, I decided to revisit my Weekly Writing Intentions post, which has been the one consistent special post since I started writing this newsletter in April of 2020.

Prior to then, I had discovered in doing daily facebook posts how useful it was to hold myself accountable in terms of writing by frequently mentioning how many words I had written in a day, or how many total words I had written on a specific manuscript. So, as the name Weekly Writing Intentions implies, my goal for this new daily newsletter to every week assess how I had done and set my intentions for the next week.

Almost immediately, however, I recognized that these posts needed to be about more than word count. For example, there are often times, sometime months, where my main writing task is doing research, especially for the historical stories, or writing outlines, or later, editing drafts. Then there are the tasks to turn the final draft into a published work. Eventually there were also the writing involved the posts like my weekly recommendations, occasional posts about being an indie author, or occasional the historical tidbit post.

I also soon discovered that writing this weekly intentions post was an integral part of my journey through my seventies to maintain a healthy balance between the work I do as an author and the work I do to maintain (or even improve) my physical and emotional well-being. This is why I found it useful most days to catalog events like my phone calls, which are essential to keeping me connected socially, or the amount of exercise I have done, which is essential for maintaining my health. I would use the weekly recap as a way of encouraging myself to step up my efforts when a minor ailment or a too-busy day got in the way of getting enough exercise, and celebrating when I saw the amount of time I spent each day increase.

But, frankly, while these posts weekly post have been helpful in helping me achieving my goals, I have been getting bored with how routine they have become. And, I shouldn’t wonder if many of you are feeling the same way.

This doesn’t mean that setting goals and holding myself accountable by sharing with you all isn’t still very helpful. And, from the comments, I know that at least some of you appreciate when I talk about the obstacles I face, since they are the often the kind ups and downs all of us can face, no matter our age or what our personal goals in life are.

This means that I will probably still give a short recap in my regular daily posts about things like number of walks taken, or time spent with friends and family on the phone or zoom, and even words written.  But in the subsequent, longer, weekly posts, I want to experiment a little.

Since high school, I have been someone who maintained a to-do list, and this means for near sixty years, every evening I look at the day’s to-do list, cross off what I have accomplished, move up what still needs to be done higher on the list, or add new tasks. But a couple of years ago a friend shared that she preferred to compile a Ta da! List that celebrated what she had done that day, she was proud of.

And I like that idea. Not, that I won’t still write that list every night, but as far as the posts I do weekly to send to you, I am going to concentrate on a ta da! list. I also decided, since word count isn’t going to be my primary goal, I am shifting back to the idea of my week starting on Monday, so I will be doing these weekly ta da! lists on Sunday.

I expect some of these posts will still mention word count if I have bee successful in getting an unusual number of words accomplished that week, or if I was successful in getting through difficult section of a manuscript that I needed to rewrite. I can also imagine celebrating when I have overcome a health obstacle. For example, I am very pleased today to say that finally, I seem to have healed a stubborn stye without having to resort to antibiotics!!

Sometimes I will share the joy I found talking with an old friend, as I did with my closest co-worker from my college teaching career. We actually shared an office, and for decades pretty much knew every up and down we each were going through, so an hour and a half talk on the phone went by in a flash yesterday.

I suspect some of my posts will deal with decisions I have made, for example, like this one where I decided to change the nature of these weekly posts. And, since I am trying to decide what my next writing project will be once I’ve completed writing the current work in progress, this will be where I announce that decision. Other times it might a simple as sharing a photo or two I took on a walk that week that really pleased me.

But, what I hope these posts won’t be, is simply the same old, same old.

In addition, I sincerely hope that many of you will be prompted to share something you would like to celebrate by writing about it in the comment section.

So, stay tuned, and see you here next Sunday for my first Ta da post!

As a sample of future posts, here are two photos from my evening walk two days ago, when the moon was rising in the east at the same time that the sun was setting in the west.

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