The halfway point of 2018 has already passed and I wanted to mark the occasion.

Okay, that’s a lie. Here’s the deal: my New Year’s resolution was to write blog every day. I’ve been pretty good about it but, including yesterday when I got home around 1:30AM, I have missed ten days. So, I have to make up those missed days to bring my number of posts to 365 by December 31st.

This is what I’ll call a Make-up Post. I’m padding my own stats.

But, speaking of stats, a few weeks ago, I passed my highest number of views in a year. In 2016, I had around 15,800 views for the whole year. As of today, I have 16,500 views (about 9,500 and 9,250 visitors, respectively). I’m pretty proud of that. The stats don’t mean much. I’m not reporting to a board or something but I’ve improved since I started this blog in 2014 (the very first one is from 2013 but it’s a one-line joke).

So, what have I learned thus far from blogging every day?

1. Writer’s block doesn’t exist. You can always write. The only problem is what you write might be really bad and boring. That’s the risk you take.
2. Writing is a muscle and I’ve been exercising it every day. It can be a slow process to crank out words when I’m not feeling it. But when I am feeling it, now that I’ve been through the more laborious posts, the writing comes much easier than it used to.
3. Tonight my friends asked me if running more had influenced my blog. It’s not a one to one correlation but the mentality is similar. When I get up to run, I have to force myself a bit. I know that once I jog just a little for a while, I’ll get into it and I’ll be glad I did it when it’s done. With writing, the part where I enjoy it might never come during the writing. But I decide at the beginning that it needs to get done, then I do it. And I love having written something.
4. I haven’t run out of ideas but it feels a lot harder to get them. But then, at the end of the week, I can look back on seven posts and I wonder how I managed to do that. That’s a cool feeling.