Now would be the time. Lunch has happened. This is a natural lull in the day. It’s the perfect time to watch some Andromeda episodes from the end of season 2 and engage in some leisurely writing. To that end, let’s get going with this new daily writing challenge. I’m at least going to consider giving this effort a go and begin the process of starting and sustaining this one-year writing project. Putting together 3 daily writing sprints of 1,000 words is probably the right and proper path forward to producing 3,000 words per day. Getting to that average writing output for the next 365 days is going to be a really big commitment in terms of both time and effort. Last time around, my writing skills were not as sharp as they are today.
We also face a world that is so full of artificially generated prose that my contribution of a million words of organized thoughts may be worth the time and effort to make this grand opus of prose happen. Right now, I have the opportunity to carve out time at the start and the end of the day to ensure longer writing sessions are possible. At the moment, I’m trying to decide if all those words should be kept in a single word processing document or each session should be just stored in a file. At the moment, I’m going to assume that I need to try to focus on two 1,500-word writing sessions at the start and end of the day.
My writing efforts are normally focused on one topic for about 500 words of content. Within the process of just settling in and writing for a bit, it is pretty easy to engage in 500 words of consideration. Even right now, this consideration of starting into a major writing project will end up covering about 500 words of content, and during the course of this grand writing endeavor, this is the only post that is going to be focused on the mathematics and consideration of writing at this pace for a whole year. It would be fruitless and frustrating to spend a year whining about producing words and word counts. The writing within the project has to be focused and ultimately driven toward a clean purpose of moving things toward a perfect possible future. It’s about considering what comes next and how we move along the path forward.
After some reflection about managing this general writing project, I’m probably going to store a month of writing in each word processing document. My output is probably just going to end up being a daily weblog post on my main domain. Each of those posts will have some social sharing built in to Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon. I’m not entirely sure that social sharing will generate any degree of interaction, but as long as this writing project is going to get interesting, sharing out updates on the progress seems like the right way to go about moving forward. Apparently, within the social sharing settings for Jetpack, I could set up additional automation for Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. It’s very unlikely that I’m going to want to share out to those platforms during this writing project. Sharing out to the three social media platforms listed above should be enough to get things going. Posting for 365 days in a row might generate some interactions.
Really, the daily question has to be about picking a solid topic and really digging into a full wave of consideration for that topic that breaks down into about 6 sections or passages. It may be possible to keep some type of backlog of potential topics that might get covered each day. Part of the big change to my writing is that instead of trying to be entirely word-economic and produce shorter passages of prose, I’m going to need to really lean into the process of writing longer missives focused on deeply evaluating concepts. Right now, I’m just watching some Andromeda episodes during the course of the afternoon and trying to figure out exactly what sort of project I’m committing to completing.
Writing and editing at the same time is going to be an interesting part of this experience. I’m planning on using the proofreading feature built into the Pages application at the end of each writing session. After running the proofreading function, I’m going to give the writing effort an additional read, and that is going to pretty much be the totality of grammarian review that is going to occur. This will, however, allow me to continue producing high-quality human-generated content each and every day. I’m going to endeavor to build a series of arguments, positions, and reflections during the next year. Ultimately, at the end of the process, I should be on sounder intellectual footing, and things should be interesting. None of my writing content is going to be generated or be in any way synthetic. For better or worse, this writing project will just be me and a keyboard making things happen on a daily basis. I’m well aware that ultimately producing a million words during the course of a year may be an impossible task and that my output will fall short.
Digging into some big themes will be a part of this writing project. It might be tackling the intersection of technology and modernity or figuring out how communities of place, interest, and circumstance change within the shadow of modernity. Those topics are and more will be considered, and I think it will be an interesting ride. My previous 5-year writing plan and some of the other outlines that I had been considering are going to have to get thrown into the daily wood chipper of creation as this river of content creation begins to flow at a much faster pace than any previous year. This time around, I’m not going to be afraid to jump between different types of content during the writing process. I’m just going to go where the writing takes me and let that guide the journey.
Even right now in the process, we just hit that point where I have written enough content in one sitting to hit that moment of exhaustion as a writer. It’s great. That is the moment where you have to just open up your thoughts and allow whatever direction, interest, or focus that is about to happen begin to take hold. That is why picking the right topic at the start is an important part of the process. You want to hit that moment of exhaustion and then just keep on writing to move just beyond the edge of what is possible. Most of the time trying to get to a point of pure stream of consciousness writing takes time. It is something that takes a lot of time or happens right at the start of the day before anything else happens. Getting into the grove of stream of consciousness style writing is a lot easier if it is something that you do on a regular basis. Having said everything that you want to say is a great place to start saying the things that just end up needing to be said.
Part of my core writing happens when things are broken down into form, function, assumptions, and structure as a part of building up and tearing down arguments. Maybe it has been a long time since I really got back into the practice of being a true reflective practitioner and pracademic writer. I spent a lot of time writing during my last effort to write 3,000 words a day, and things broke down about halfway into the effort. This time around, we will see what happens during the journey. It is entirely possible that we will see some false starts, some pauses, and even a few breaks in the process. I’m confident that now is the time to just get going and make it happen. That is the attitude that needs to be sustained along the journey to just keep things going and keep the writing flowing.
I’m going to assume that this post will serve as the signpost announcing that this journey is starting and that a lot of content is going to be produced. It will probably end up being a lot more content than anybody is going to consume in a single sitting or probably during the entire process. Maybe in the end it will be a grand epic that cannot even be printed in a single volume. Modern printing methods used by the service I have used in the past can accommodate 800 pages in paperback or hardcover. That is a lot of content to have in one weighty tome. We will see where it ends up, but as I begin with the end in mind I’m going to guess that 800 pages will be enough to hold the totality of this writing project. At 300 words per page that would be a 240,000-word manuscript. My guess is that a little bit of font and margin work could probably push that to 300,000 words or roughly 821 words per day. That would end up being a lot of words to write during the course of a year, but would fall substantially short of my yearly writing target of a million words.
All of the writing for this block of content occurred on Saturday, May 17, 2025. My plans for the day included attending an event in the evening, so my target writing window was the afternoon. This is the first post in a series that should last an entire trip around the sun. The post was proofread by Pages version 14.4 and lightly edited before posting.