New Year, Who Dis?

“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”

– Henry Ford

A novel I recently read had a great line about forgiveness.  One of the fictional cultures had a practice of stating how one would make amends instead of saying sorry, putting action ahead of words.  I failed in producing a Wandering for the past few weeks, breaking my streak just shy of a year.  Since this blog is for me more than anyone else, my amends are aimed towards myself: I will ensure I have a surplus of posts ready to go so I don’t let the holidays knock me off course again.

Now that that’s resolved, let’s talk about this new year’s direction.  Last year, my Wanderings covered a wide variety of topics.  One week would be a movie review, the next would be a think piece on international affairs, and the one after that would be a long-form dad joke.  While this served the purpose of making me write consistently, it didn’t translate well into making me work on my novels.  Since that’s where I want the bulk of my writing effort going, this proves problematic.

My solution: adopt a lesson from Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work and focus my blog on what progress my novels and writing skills have made.  The hope is this will force me to both think more deeply about my development as a writer and serve as a self-induced guilt trip to make me sit down and write.  Seeing as I’m a new father, I need to practice doing that anyways—win-win!

That said, I do reserve the right to Wander off onto paths that are sufficiently shiny (The Recruit on Netflix is wonderful and deserves a binge, for example).  But those will serve as some of the buffer posts I create to make sure I don’t have a lapse again.  My primary effort is focusing on my writing. If that interests you, fantastic!  If not, also great!  You do you, champ.  I’ll do the same.