I intended to work on The Clean Sheet and post something every week. I also wanted to promote it a little more by posting a link on facebook.
The Good
I post on average twice in a month and I draft a couple of additional posts. The way I login to the site has changed slightly which means the first thing I see now is the statistics of how many views and how many unique visitors I have. When I first saw this I was so impressed with the numbers! Sure, in the scheme of things they are not at all high, but I thought they would be single figures. Amazing! I was properly thrilled by this.
The Bad
When I started this part of the project Christmas got in the way, sort of. However, in an ideal world I would celebrate every national holiday; baking pumpkin pie at Halloween, hanging little eggies on a branch for Easter and hand making cards and gifts for Christmas and Birthdays. Last year I enjoyed the run up to Christmas more than ever and I felt more festive than usual. I was better organized and I was actually able to give some handmade gifts. The flat looked especially pretty. I really enjoyed it. The only thing bad about this is that I wasn’t working in the studio or doing Clean Sheet; I was playing Christmas.
The Ugly
There is always the Purpose trap. The Clean Sheet doesn’t serve a Purpose in that it doesn’t earn me money and there won’t be any terrible consequences if I don’t post anything, so it’s easy to devalue it and ‘do it later’. Given what I wrote in the beginning writing clearly does add value to my life and therefore I should treat it in the way that it deserves to be treated.
Moving forward
If I could post every week for the rest of the year I think that would get me really far in terms of habit and writing skills. Maybe it’s a bit ambitious to try to write every week so it would be ideal to build up a selection of finished posts that I can add to the site if I don’t have a lot of time.
The Reality
The reality is that I still don’t have a set routine of any kind for my days at home. I fear the routine because it’s too much like Work. I fear having no routine because then I flounder around and end up wasting time. Luckily The Clean Sheet is something that I often feel like doing so it’s easier to sit down and just do it, especially as I don’t need to carve out an entire afternoon.
Post Script
A strange thing happened regarding the Clean Sheet. It’s been very quiet where I work so I drafted some partial posts in the office to kill a bit of time, and it not only killed some time, it seemed to kill my inspiration a bit too. I am not sure why this happened but I haven’t felt quite the same since. Perhaps it made me realise that I don’t want to be a writer because writing Clean Sheet all day felt as unsustainable as my office job did at that moment. I think it just frightened me a bit; that one day the reality could be that I am not working in an office and I am working on something else, like the Clean Sheet. It felt more real because it wasn’t just something I was doing at home as a hobby.
I have not drawn any major conclusions from this, it did rattle me though and the feeling still lingers. I am curious what is going on…
For the rest of 2016 I’d like to finish the Happiness Project posts, add to the Mouse Carnival, do some random writing and a new series about Masterpieces. Masterpieces in my opinion.
I hope to see you on the reader statistics graph sometime soon!
Kim
Co-founder, The Clean Sheet