Blogging Month Challenge - Half Done

So, here we are, halfway through the challenge that I set myself at the beginning of the month on blogging daily. I have only missed a few days, usually due to an event.

For instance on Thursday night, I was at Fermentations on the Danforth for a pretty cool event. A bunch of us, bloggers and beer people, were asked to come in and make a beer for the 20th anniversary of Fermentations. This was the culmination of that work. I came home tired and happy from the event. Got to meet some twitterers that I had been following or had connected with for the first time face to face. I was not quite sure what to blog about an event that passed and it does seem too introspective for a blog of this type. I will definitely get some posts based on conversations I had but I need time for them to marinate.

On Friday, it was Bowmore Fun Carnival. I had made a Cherry Beer and Bacon cake for the event and had a few food truck goodies. I spent an hour and a bit on my feet and wasn't really feeling up to blogging after that.

Thus, it comes to the crux of the matter, why am I doing this? In this first post of this month, Leave the Money, Take the Cannoli, I outlined why I thought I was doing this challenge. The criteria never included getting popular but the stats based on my posts showed me something that I had not expected. It seems that there are more people than I thought who find my stuff enjoyable enough to read it on a regular basis. Hello there! The funny thing is that they are split 60/40 between facebook and twitter. Every now and then some post will strike someone's fancy and I'll get a bigger uptick. These are generally restaurant reviews.

Anyways, I had concerns with what I was posting and talked it over with my wife. The issues that I was having was that some of the posts were more of an informational nature of something you could find out on the google. I wrote these posts because I had committed to this challenge. Some of them could use a bit more time to ferment. The posts I like to write and I am proud of are invariably personal and funny bits. The drunk reviews of restaurants where I can rant, the how to read a recipe where I can play and some of the experiments of stuff I am messing with are my favourites.

Blogging every day has helped me with a few things. I think more about what I am going to do next and focus on the structure and writing. I now make time for the blog in a more habitual way. I am more aware of themes. The negative to the everyday grind is that, sometimes, I am posting facts and forgetting the quirky flourishes or the thoughtfulness that I prefer in my posts. Maybe this will come as I round out the month and keep on trucking.

I will finish this month but when it is all done, I am sure that I will have found out some interesting thoughts about my connection to the written word and food. Already, this exercise has given pause.