Another journal

It’s funny, because I’ve had this blog for ages and ages and have gone through bouts of regular blogging between spells of nothing, so there are bits here that I am sure I set up with great intent and then promptly forgot about. Like there’s a whole “Links” section to make a blogroll I can drop into the sidebars etc? I have a permanently in-progress Links Page, yet I kind of want to also utilise the neat built-in option, even though I feel like I have more than enough going on in my sidebar.

The links that are in the WP built-in for the blogroll are all so old. It’s wonderful how many people in them I still know, have followed from site to site. Who I still send holiday cards to. What a time capsule. I link to my shared Google Reader.

I feel sometimes like I’m trying to relearn things I used to know. Commenting on other people’s stuff, searching out other people’s work. Make the world you want, etc.

I think, its a bit? I am jealous of some of the more basic, or hand coded, or “classic” blogs folks have. I love building a site! I have too many things in general going on though, so finding the time feels like a promised struggle. At the start of each year I plot out goals (small, medium, large) and my multi-planner system has been now honed to break things into digestible parts so I actually do accomplish all these (small, medium, large) things I want to do. So maybe next year I’ll make a ~fun~ site.

For no reason other than breaking up this post, please enjoy this side-by-side from my texts-to-self of a photo I took at the aquarium and a speed paint I did from it.

Anyway for fun, as we’re coming up on the middle of the year why don’t I indulge myself in seeing how many words I’ve written:

Fiction

I am writing something longform and if we’re only looking at words on the page, not supplementary worldbuilding stuff, that project got some 9,705 words in this calendar year (there’s a total of some like 37k, but other projects have eaten into my writing time).

For Flash Fiction February 2026 it looks like I knocked out 16,747 of words across 28 flash pieces (more stats here).

I haven’t done more than make loose notes on other fiction this year so far, which is! fine! obviously!! (or I wouldn’t be using exclamation points). I have actually some non-fiction and fnanfic goals this year but we’re not there yet.

Other

In blog posts this year I’ve racked up 12,178 words of posting weekly. The big thing here is I’m trying to just, you know, post. Like not always About A Thing. I am making it About A Thing here because whatever, but I am trying to just blog like a normal person, like the person I once was who blogged.

Over at the newsletter, somehow it’s only 10,113 words across six months of monthly newsletters, it seems like it should be more? But I think the photos make it feel bigger.

I’m not going to count my Patreon/Comradery posts (of which I’ve made 30 so far this year), because those are like, emails basically.

And the total is

48,743, which is both a lot and not much. This year I’ve also broken a book up for serialisation, sewn clothes, finished a quilt, finished a big metadata project (would you believe that the post about that is one of my longer blog posts). I love stats but I have to be careful because they mean nothing but numbers are so tempting to quantify.

Anyway, this is my mid-year check-in of like: I am doing things actually. I like the things I’m doing. It’s good, actually, to want to do more and do better because what a hell it would be to have nowhere to grow.