What an amazing feat by Jeremy Keith:
I missed the daily deadline once. I could make the excuse that it was a really late night of carousing, but I knew in advance that I was going to be out so I could’ve written my 100 words ahead of time—I didn’t.
I didn’t go twelve days before missing my first day and here I am several weeks in having missed several days. I utterly failed. So I applaud Jeremy with a long, slow clap.
I realised a few weeks into the project that the piece of software I was writing in (and relying on for an accurate word count) was counting hyphenated phrases as one word. So the phrase “dog-eat-dog world” was counted as two words, not four.
On the Mac I was using the Evernote client to count the number of words my posts were. On iOS I had to use Simplenote since Evernote didn’t show word count there (ahem, Evernote team!). After writing a few posts on my iPad I realized that Simplenote was counting the title in with the post count. So there are a few that are off by 3 words. Oh well.
Most of the posts used observations from that day for their subject matter—diary-like slices of life.
I read every single post Jeremy wrote and I really enjoyed each one.
Since I failed so miserably I may not continue to even try but, rather, move onto something far more different for me in my blogging. First, though, I need to reflect on why I failed so miserably at this simple task — given that I have written daily on my blog without issue several other times.
The answer that comes to mind first is the issue of writing on weekends. I generally write on my computer. I seldom write on my blog using a mobile device or a tablet. Barley works great on these devices and I could have done so… but it simply isn’t what I do. Even if I was using a different application or service I still wouldn’t write on weekends. So I think I set myself up for failure. (Side note: I saw Jeremy would do anything to get his post up. So I have no excuse at all.)
Either way (whether or not I continue) I think what Jeremy did was amazing. Kudos.