The blog is a year old today! What began as five hundred words (almost) every day has ended up being 342 posts of an average length of about 644 words (excluding the fiction which is typically over a thousand words each). Before I started, I had a total of about ninety thousand words written, most of which were spent on different drafts of my first book. It would have taken you half an hour at most to read through all of the short stories I had written, and my biggest accomplishment was The Archive, my personal wiki for all the nations, events, and denizens of Nacre Then.

I’ve written three times more words in this past year alone than my combined writing history prior, all because of this blog. I’ve grown immensely as a writer and have learned a lot about myself and the craft.

Before I started the Daily Dose, I hated writing. I called myself a writer, but really I just had this universe in my head that wanted to get out. Writing has never come easy to me, and truth by told it still isn’t. But I’ve since found stories and characters that I want to write about. I’ve finally found a broad story in Nacre Then that I want to tell (the anthology that doesn’t focus on one character), I’ve discovered Lisa Stenton, and my brothers and I are starting to explore Naya, a new world we’re building a game out of. The Daily Dose was the inspiration I was looking for to become more than I was, and I know that the future will only bring more growth.

I’m coming to realize how far I have yet to go, too. I’m still not a great editor, and for some reason I get bored with stories that go on for too long. This means that if I want to finish something, ten thousand words is the limit, and once I get there I move on to something else without making the edits I know need to happen.

Still, I think I’m ready to start looking to publicize myself. I want to start publishing my standalone short stories like “The Amazing Sightseer” and “Fortune’s Fool” to name a few. I don’t know if I’ll finish Rise of the Riftguard by the end of the year, but if I do I want to start presenting myself to publishers with it.

All that said, I’m pondering some (more) possible blog changes in the future. I don’t have anything solid yet, or even a plan for when I’m going to be giving this more thought, but I think I’m going to combine “Me” and “Life” posts into one, since they’ve always tended to bleed together. In it’s place, I want to add a second “Weekly Short” post to up my fiction output. The problem is, I don’t know what day this should be. The middle of the week works best,but it would require shifting everything around and I’m not quite sure I want to do that just yet.

So, here’s to another year of growth and learning. Let’s see what the future holds.