Eleven months of daily musings

I have now completed eleven months of daily musings [1,2]. At the end of each month, I like to step back and reflect upon what I’ve learned, or have not learned, in the month of writing. Early on, I found myself reflecting on what I had learned about writing and about how my writing was changing. At this point, I find that my writing style has reached a somewhat fixed point. I don’t seem to be evolving much as a writer. Is that okay? I’m still not sure. I’d like to become a better writer. But I also enjoy writing for the sake of writing.

This past month I’ve had difficulty keeping up with daily essays. In part, it was that I was out of town and busy for ten days. But I also have a very different rhythm to my life in the summer. I work as much during the day, but I don’t tend to work at night. So, while the daily musing was a good way to break from work in the evening, it seems like a less good way to break from whatever I"m doing most evenings (reading books, playing with my family, watching silly TV series with my family, whatever).

Nonetheless, I consider it important to write daily. So I really do need to find a way to incorporate these musings in my daily routine. I also have a fairly large backlog of things to muse about. Perhaps I’ll write them in the morning, rather than at night. Perhaps I’ll find a time during the day that I want to take a break. We’ll see.

But I’ve missed a lot of musings this past month [5]. Perhaps I’ll try doing two musings per day until I catch up. Or perhaps not.

What will I muse about this month? Each month, I say that I should write more profiles. Perhaps I will find a way to do so this month.
I also need to write the daily readings and labs for CSC 151. Will the drafts of those make good musings? We will see. There are also a few series that I should continue, including notes on my tastes in music and comments on CS principles. I’ve also promised to start a series on our summer code camps.

I also seemed to have trouble keeping up with the indexing. As I was putting this reflection together, I realized that I had never indexed musings 348 and 349.
I’ve now rectified that situation [6].

As I say each month, stay tuned!

[1] Well, eleven months and a few days, since I’m posting this late.

[2] I’m using a variety of counting schemes. I number each essay I post in order. But there are days I post two [3] musings and there are days in which I forget to post a musing. At the end of each month, I post one of these reflections. For anniversaries, I’m counting from when I restarted in September 1, 2016. August 31, 2017 will be one year [4].

[3] Or more.

[4] That counting assumes that I get back to posting daily musings.

[5] I posted eighteen musings in June. That means that I’m twelve musings behind.

[6] I’ve also fixed some inconsistencies in the index by number.

Version 1.0 of 2017-07-04.