2019 Wrap Up

For almost a decade I have written a blog post once a week. If I look back on the years 2010 to 2018, I can sum up all my posts into categories: things I wanted to share, blocks of instructions, book reviews, reading lists, author interviews and rants that I called “a call to arms.” After the first year or so, I found it difficult to keep coming up with something to write about. Every year in December when thinking about what I wanted to do for the coming year, I would try to plan things out. At best I could come up with a few ideas, often seasonal things.

For 2019, I thought I would write my manifesto. Over the years I would think about my manifesto or at the very least what my manifesto would be like. I could never come up with anything particularly. I have so many pages of musings, and sketches of ideas, but I never completed a single thing. So, knowing this about myself, why now? Why 2019? And furthermore, what would my manifesto be like? After all, I don't live in a secluded cabin with a personal vendetta against anyone or anything. I really don't care about anything. Part of it is apathy, and part of it is that I have gotten to think about the things I wanted to think about, and I've always gotten to do all the things that I've ever wanted to do. A manifesto for a guy like me is not really something I would need to do.

But, I was faced with 52 blog posts for the year 2019. I decided that I would make a cohesive piece of writing that I would then split up over the entire year. I decided to have exactly 12 chapters of about 4,000 words each that I would make into 4 blog posts of 1,000 words each. I would post on Wednesdays. Not a bad way of doing things. Then I decided that I would share something, a Youtube video or something else that would enhance my series in those months when there were five Wednesdays.

So, then, what would I write about?

Well, I took to my heroes. I looked at all the chapter headings that Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson had. I looked at the various points of the Scout Law that I know so well from my time with The Boy Scouts of America. I came up with nearly twenty chapter titles. Then I narrowed it down to twelve.

Then I wrote.

The two things I was hoping to achieve with this exercise were these: a cohesive manuscript and an ease in the writing of a year's worth of blog posts. I feel successful on both counts. I feel like I could read this entire year's worth of posts as a single manuscript-style manifesto. And I also feel like it was an easy thing to write. Every time I sat down to write, I knew exactly where I was, where I was heading and where I have been.

In short, it was a great experience.