Writing in 2016: A Short Retrospective History

El Progreso Del Peregrino translates to “the pilgrim’s progress,” and last year the pilgrim certainly made a lot of progress in his trek across the land of writing. Many, many hours were spent at the keyboard writing, editing, deleting, rewriting, and publishing—all for the sake of practicing and refining the craft, as wells as building both confidence in my skills and a portfolio that speaks for itself. If you read the posts from Tuesday and Wednesday you already know the stats from last year, and yesterday I tossed out a list of some of my more notable work from 2016, but today I thought I’d take the time to do a short retrospective on the year in writing—chronicling the major writing events of the year and giving a small bit of context to some of the work I did. Let’s start at the beginning, and move forward one step at a time.

2016 began with a continuation of the work I was doing at the end of 2015, namely the continued publishing of travelogue posts from the 2015 journey across Europe. It wouldn’t be until January 20th that I completed this task, but even then Europe 2015 wasn’t quite done at that point. There were still all the side stories from that trip I wanted to publish and these would take a few more weeks to work my way through.

The transition away from Europe 2015 and on to other things finally came on February 10th. I had initially considered taking a break from writing and not publishing anything for awhile, but I knew that if I stopped writing there was the very real chance that I’d lose all momentum and not return to it, so I committed myself to just keep going. There wasn’t any real plan for what to write about—I just needed to write about something. Life stories and current events are comparatively easy places to mine for content, so I began there with a post about my experience leading up to seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens and went from there. In the weeks that followed I slowly expanded my sphere of writing to include my thoughts on various topics, and I also announced the start of the 2016 Writing Project (a project that that’s still ongoing, by the way).

March saw the publishing of a number of writing pieces that would become foundational for some of the work I would be doing for the rest of the year. On the 8th I published a writing piece on cinematic video game trailers, which was the first post of the year in which I tried to discuss a particular aspect of gaming. Soon afterwards came the first installment of my Borderlands 2 commentary. This was my first time writing about a game as I played it, and would be the predecessor to my Late to the Party series. March 18th saw me dipping my toes into the ugly world of politics with a post on Donald Trump. I didn’t particularly want to write it, but the ascendency of Donald Trump had become too big of an issue for me to ignore, and writing about Trump helped prepare me for the other political writings I would do later in the year. Towards the end of March I also published my sole instructional post of the year, on wood photo transfers, thus fulfilling my teaching quota for 2016.

The coming of Spring heralds an explosion of life in the world, and in my writing career it saw the birth of Late to the Party, which would become a flagship writing series on this blog and continue all the way to the end of the year. It all began with my commentary on Call of Duty: Ghosts, and when Season 1 of Late to the Party came to a conclusion the series had racked up a total of 22 entries. Believe me when I say I didn’t know at the time that it would become as big of deal as it ended up being.

By the start of May I had settled into a regular routine and by then I felt like I had my writing rhythm down. I was publishing Monday through Friday, with four days per week being short posts about whatever was on my mind, and then one longer writing piece per week, which normally fell on Friday. From thereafter writing was both easy and hard. It was easy in the sense that I had a schedule so I knew what I needed to do each week, but it was hard in that I was holding myself to five posts per week, so I was constantly searching for and thinking up new ideas on things to write about. In the Spring and early Summer timespan I think the most notable event was the long overdue completion of a writing piece I had started years earlier on a game called Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. I chose to have it be the 300th post to this blog, and it stands to this day as the greatest instance of resurrecting a formerly dead piece of work in my writing career.

Things were chugging along at a decent clip in the summer of 2016, until the end of June when my housing problems began. All the stress and turmoil surrounding those days nearly derailed the writing progress I was making that year, but I kept myself to my schedule, if only just barely. I did, however, relax the expectations a bit in terms of the volume of words published, and if you look you’ll see there are few posts from that time with more than just a few hundred words. All through the month of July and into August I kept myself writing, even if I wasn’t producing as much as I would have liked.

In my mind August 12th marks the unofficial return to normalcy on this blog, as I published the first entry of Late to the Party since the housing troubles had begun. I was settled into my new home and ready to resume writing as usual. It didn’t take long for me to get back into the groove and for the next three months the stream of writing flowed at a steady pace. During that time I cranked out quite a few editions of Late to the Party, published both the Activation series and the Memorable Places series, and the blog got assaulted by an onslaught of spam bot visitors that continues to this day.

November brought with it two major events that influenced the direction of my writings for the remainder of the year. The first one was my finding employment, which considerably reduced the amount of time I had to dedicate to writing, and the second was the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. With my job making me put in long hours and draining me both physically and mentally, writing got a lot harder and forced me to indefinitely postpone some of the writing projects I had in mind. Thankfully, Season 1 of Late to the Party was nearly done at that point, and I would finish the year with the final entry squeaking across the finish line on December 30th. The election of Donald Trump, though it caused great consternation amongst a lot of my friends, in a strange way was a good thing for my writings in that it led to the production of two of my best political writing pieces of the year—my two Election Aftermath posts. Trump’s election also made me realize that I would be continuing to write about politics in 2017, even if it was something I only did once every few months. I had waded into the pool, and although I wasn’t yet strong enough to swim out to the deep end, I wasn’t getting out of the pool any time soon either.

2016’s writing closed out with me keeping to the schedule and ending the year with over 154k words published. It was a long and at times bumpy ride, but through all the toil and tribulation it also was the year that I proved to myself that I could produce a large body of work over an extended period. Never again can I believe the lie that I’m not able to do this. The year speaks for itself, and years from now I think I’ll look back on 2016 as a major turning point in my writing career.