Five years ago (pre-Covid, even!), I set a goal to publish five posts in November. What’s more, I actually achieved it!

I’d like to try again this November (starting Friday…).

There are a lot of drafts waiting

As I wrote last month, my real problem isn’t with writing, but with publishing. So the main driver for this challenge has been seriously looking at what I might like to complete before the end of 2024.

There are drafts I’ve started this year. There are follow-on posts to posts that have been published this year. There are anniversaries I wanted to mark which have come (and gone) this year. There are things that have happened to me this year which I wanted to write about.

And even when I’m firm and try to cut the list down to the bare minimum, I still end up with more than ten posts I really want to complete this year. In fact, it’s not hard to think of at least five categories, each with multiple drafts I want to finish:

  • Past photos (definitely before 2024, and many of them from the 2010s).
  • This year’s photos (with associated experiences).
  • Religion (I don’t think it will ever be the focus it was in the first years of the blog, but it still affects me and interests me).
  • Hiking / travel (in particular, the longest hike and furthest afield I’ve been this year has been the Larapinta Trail in Australia’s Red Centre, and ideally I want to write something about it before getting to my 2024 summary post in January).
  • Books I’ve been reading (I could probably rattle off titles for five such book posts without drawing breath…).

This isn’t new: Every year I get to October or November and go “There are far more posts that I want to complete this year than I have any realistic chance of completing”. But it feels worse when I’ve only published ten posts for the year, and some of them I had to spin off large sections into a separate draft just to get a post finalised for month end.

August’s post starts a three part series. So did March’s. And January’s post had several sections cut, each of which could be a post in its own right.

There’s pride on the line again this year

In 2022, I had a far lower post count and word count than I’d had for each of the previous five years. It wasn’t ideal, but it was fine: I’d been in North America for three months and I’d had a lot of other stuff going on in my life. This year, my published post count and word count through to September was basically the same as in 2022 - but without the same excuse.

So the first target - and one which I should be able to achieve with the first couple of posts in November - is just to beat 2022’s word count.

Is it really going to happen?

I’ve got no idea. Putting my “realist” hat on, I have to say there’s no obvious reason for November to be different from January or July - both of which only have one post. But I’m also confident that if I focus on finishing existing drafts rather than starting new things it’s possible (whether I’ll actually do that is of course a separate question…).

The last time I tried this - though I didn’t announce it publicly - was actually November 2022. I’d had most of October to settle back into Melbourne, and I no longer had international travel as an excuse, but I still wasn’t even close.

However, I know what I’ve always known: I can’t expect to publish many posts in a month if I can’t even publish anything in the first half.

So, there’s the real marker I’ll be watching: If I have two posts published before the 15th - like I did in November 2019 - this challenge is well and truly on. And if I haven’t published any posts by the 15th, well, it’s probably not happening.

Ultimately, though, it will definitely be a failure if I’m still scrambling to publish one post in the final week of November. But I don’t think it will be a failure if I publish several posts that I like, but don’t quite make it to five by the end of the month. Yes, it would be a disappointment - but I’m used to dealing with disappointments in my publishing schedule.