by Chris McGinty
I’ve been joking (sort of) that my New Year’s resolution was to download the Kroger app. It’s a thing I’ve been talking about doing for a while and it seemed like a New Year’s resolution I could keep. It took me until almost the end of January to finally do that. Even then, I had to call tech support because I clearly don’t know that spell as a 2nd level magic-user. I’m trying to remember, did they call that a seer in the Basic Set?
Well, whaddya know. I remembered something.
Anyway, it’s downloaded. Whether I use it or not might be a New Year’s resolution for 2026. The truth is blogging daily is probably more my real New Year’s resolution, but I feel like that is more of a long term goal than anything. Regardless of that, I would like to talk about the benefits I’ve noticed from posting daily so far this year.
I tend to write almost every day. I used to write more words a day than I have been for a while, but I still write daily. There is something different about focusing on something that can be posted. You improve as a writer in some areas that writing daily without posting can’t do. Maybe it’s the deadline.
When Nathan and I did a daily blog in 2011, I got better at sitting down and writing without struggling for ideas. Ideas have never been a problem for me. Good ideas, maybe that’s been a problem. When you’re trying to post every other day (that’s how Nathan and I split it up back then) you stop worrying about whether the ideas are good. And sometimes the not so good ideas ended up working, sometimes they didn’t.
A few years ago, I posted every day for a month and then stopped. That was when I learned a lot more about making the themes of each post be more connected to other posts.
Last year, for a month and a half, I posted a blog and a short piece of fiction daily then I stopped when it started feeling like I was using the last thirty minutes of every day to come up with two ideas, which wasn’t the creative process I wanted. But even if it wasn’t the ideal attempt at going daily, I improved at improvising material while under pressure.
I don’t know if this year will be the year that I finally get the daily thing right, but what I’ve improved upon this year is the ability to write multiple posts during the times that I have significant time to write. What this means is that when I sit down to schedule I usually have a few finished posts ready to go up. Before it was very much about needing to write something and then post. Now I can get the posting out of the way and then do some writing. It makes a difference, because I feel like I have more creative freedom while writing because the blog is already current.
The downsides have been that I still haven’t had a week or more scheduled, so I am still sometimes writing just to have something to post. While I think that my output is improving, I think this first month has been pretty rough quality wise. I feel like if I don’t get significantly scheduled by the end of February, I’ll need to stop again. Yet, I feel a lot more confident about it this year than I did last year at this time.
Chris McGinty is a blogger who actually enjoys posting daily, which is why he keeps trying to make it daily. If it wasn’t for that, he probably would have stopped again by now.