One year ago, I made my first post on this blog.

My intentions for this blog were to post at least once a week, and to practice writing. With 59 posts published in the last year, I’ve made the average of one per week, even though there were some weeks that went by without a post.

I participated in some short story writing activities through terribleminds.com/ramble/blog/, I wrote essays for myself, and I started a different blog to contain my hiking and athletic type posts (that way I could share them with co-workers without censoring myself here). I wrote a short ebook, and I’m in the process of publishing a second book both physically and in ebook form. I finished a novel that I started back in 2010, and wrote a couple novellas. I consider that as practice accomplished and then some.

I’m happy with my progress. In a way, it’s an accomplishment just to have kept posting for a whole year. When I first thought of using “overthinking” for my domain, I, of course, wanted the overthinking.blogspot.com. The jmboverthinking was a second choice. But it was instructive to visit that http://overthinking.blogspot.com/. There are four posts, all from August 6th 2001. Not one post is longer than a sentence, and one is entirely a quote in Portuguese. The last thing I wanted was to have a blog like that – so few posts, and no activity for over a decade. I might not be blogging for more than 15 years like John Scalzi over at Whatever, but if I want to, then I have to keep going.

And it has been good practice to be writing for two blogs instead of just one. I’m making myself write to a deadline (once a week), and, especially since I tapered off doing the Flash Fiction Challenges, I’m forcing myself to figure out something to write about. The downside to that is that I haven’t been writing as much fiction, but I think that a break is healthy. And my talents seem to lie more in writing non-fiction than fiction, at least for now.

I didn’t buy a raffle ticket this year. Instead, I spent money on a month of Crossfit classes (and writing a blog entry for each class attended), and a Kindle Paperwhite, so I can view my ebooks on an actual ereader and figure out what works best formatting wise (instead of letting bad reviews tell me what doesn’t work).

I can’t be successful by not doing anything. Instead of being scared that what I’m writing is not good enough, or that no one will buy it, I’m giving it a shot. I’ll see what works, and what doesn’t, and I’ll figure out what I want to do next.

First things first: keep writing.

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