Writing a Blog Post a Day: What 919 Consecutive Days of Blogging Taught Me

On 9 February 2024, I made a decision: I would write a post a day. It was a bold plan, and I wondered how long it’d last.

There was no grand ceremony attached to it. I did not draw up a business plan, announce a productivity challenge via social media or promise the world that I would become the most prolific blogger on the internet. I simply chose a pace and began working to it.

Today, Saturday 15 August 2026, that decision is 918 days old. Counting the day I began as the first, this is day 919.

That number looks ridiculous (a well-rounded 1000 sounds better) when I put it on the screen. It sounds as though I have sat down in front of 919 blank pages and produced 919 completely new articles, one after another, without ever running short of ideas. That is not quite how it has worked.

Many posts have been written from scratch. Others began life many years ago, back when I was blogging sporadically, long before I had even completed my first novel, SEETHINGS.

My site has been around long enough to have acquired its own history. I wrote about that history in Fifteen Years on WordPress – A Retrospective Journey, tracing the blog from personal reflections and sailing stories through photography, novel writing, dark fiction and the subjects that occupy it today.

An old archive might look like an easy source of daily material. Pick something dusty, change a few words, replace an image and press Publish. Job done.

If only it were that simple.

An old post is not automatically worth saving

When I return to an old post, the first question is not, How quickly can I refresh this? It is, Does this still belong here?

Some of the old material had become irrelevant. It said nothing useful about writing, fiction, relationships, photography or the personal experiences that feed those subjects. Those posts were trashed. Keeping something merely because I once wrote it is not a good enough reason to make a reader wade through it now.

Other posts contained one worthwhile observation buried inside material that no longer justified a page of its own. Those were condensed. Some covered much the same territory as another article, so the useful parts were blended into a stronger post. The remainder survived, but survival did not mean receiving a quick polish. They were reconsidered, rewritten, given updated details and, where appropriate, new images.

Every one of them was scrutinised.

Does the title tell readers what they are about to read? Does the opening arrive at the subject soon enough? Is the information still correct? Is there a point to the piece? Does it sound like me? Does it lead naturally towards another part of the site, or does it sit alone like a chair facing the wrong wall?

This rebuilding work eventually became a subject of its own in Broken Links and Aligning My Site for a More Intimate Browsing Experience. Once a site grows beyond a certain size, it stops being a pile of individual posts. It becomes a connected body of work. If those connections are weak, readers cannot see the shape of it.

Knitting the old and new together

I often describe the internal-linking work as knitting in old posts. The phrase suits it. Each refreshed article has to connect with the fabric around it without looking as though a link has been shoved into a sentence simply because a website report said one was needed.

This post belongs primarily to my writing material, but writing does not exist in isolation here. It runs through everything else.

It leads into the dark-fiction work behind SEETHINGS and its modern approach to noir thrillers. It gives shape to the difficult relationship discussions that moved from the page to my sexless-marriage podcast. Photography and storm chasing become more than collections of attractive images when I use them for creative writing inspired by thunderstorms. Even personal posts, such as my slightly theatrical attempt to explain why a dark-fiction author lives in sunny Mandurah, return to the person doing the writing.

These are different subjects, but they are not different identities. They are parts of the same author’s site.

The range is visible in only the past fortnight. One day I was pulling apart the morally questionable world of noir; soon afterwards I was considering the emotional effects of a marriage without physical intimacy. A piece about Newgrange as a tomb, temple or ancient calendar brought travel, history, photography and storytelling together. Then I turned to a recycled building project and explained how we built a shed for the cost of a box of screws. I also returned to the business of being an author by comparing selling books in person with marketing them online.

Placed side by side, those posts may look eclectic. Follow their links and themes, however, and the structure becomes clearer. They reflect the subjects I write about, the experiences behind that writing and the practical work required to put books and ideas before readers. The daily pace has not created those interests. It has given me a disciplined way to develop and connect them.

That is what the daily-post project has gradually clarified. At first, the challenge was to keep publishing. Later, the more important task became making sure every publication strengthened the whole.

Daily writing does not remove the difficult part

You might think writing every day makes writing easier. In one sense, it does. Sitting down becomes normal. The empty page loses some of its menace. I do not have to wait for inspiration to arrive wearing a dramatic cloak and carrying a bolt of lightning. I begin, and the ideas usually catch up.

But familiarity does not remove judgement.

An author still has to choose the right beginning, cut the sentence that is getting in the way, check a doubtful fact and decide whether the conclusion has actually earned its place. A daily deadline can make those decisions more urgent, but it cannot make them unnecessary.

I have already admitted that I love writing and hate the editing. Writing creates momentum. Editing applies the brakes, sends me backwards and asks why I used that word when another would have been sharper. Unfortunately, that irritating second stage is often where a post becomes worth reading.

Authors know this. We can tell ourselves that a short blog post is not a novel chapter, but the standard does not vanish because the word count is lower. A paragraph still needs rhythm. An anecdote still needs direction. A title still makes a promise. If you are an author, you will agree there are no shortcuts when it comes to writing.

The practical work continues around the words too. Links must go to the right places. Images need to add something rather than merely occupy space. The page has to work on the device most readers use. As I noted in Why Mobile Rules, most of my visitors arrive on phones, so long blocks of text, cluttered layouts and awkward image galleries can undo good writing before it is read.

And yes, the work must be saved. My habit of repeatedly pressing CTRL+S earned an entire post about backing up writing as I go. Losing a morning’s work would be annoying at any time. Losing it while trying to maintain a daily rhythm would be a special kind of punishment.

A post a day is not advice for every author

I once considered the more sensible question, How Often Should Authors Blog?. The answer for most authors is unlikely to be seven times a week. A weekly post, or two well-considered posts a week, may suit the available time, the audience and the work far better.

My routine grew out of my site’s particular circumstances. I had a large archive, new material I wanted to explore and an old structure that needed to be reconsidered one piece at a time. The daily commitment gave that work momentum. It stopped the archive clean-up from becoming one of those jobs I would return to “someday”.

That does not mean the pace has been easy to maintain.

Some days, a new piece arrives almost intact. The idea is clear, the tone feels right, and the ending appears before I have had time to worry about it. On other days, an apparently simple refresh reveals a post with three beginnings, no real conclusion and an argument that belonged to another version of the site. What looked like thirty minutes of work consumes half a day.

There are also days when I wonder who is out there. I explored that familiar uncertainty in Does Anybody Read Blogs? Writer’s Doubts from Blogger Island. Publishing online can feel like sending words towards a distant shore without knowing whether anyone saw them leave.

Statistics provide part of the answer, but not all of it. A large number of impressions is not automatically a success if the people seeing a post were looking for something entirely different. I would rather an article reach the right smaller audience than disappoint a much larger wrong one. As I put it elsewhere, writers do not need more readers; they need better-matched ones.

That lesson affects the refresh work too. I am not trying to make every old post appeal to everyone. I am trying to make it clearer, more useful and more honestly connected to what this site is about.

What 919 days have given me

Writing a post a day has produced far more than a long row of publication dates.

It has forced me to look closely at the archive I created, including the person I was when I wrote its earliest pieces. It has shown me which subjects were temporary interests and which ones kept returning because they were part of my writing life. It has made the connections between fiction, human behaviour, intimacy, photography and personal experience easier to see.

Most importantly, it has kept me writing.

Not preparing to write. Not waiting for the perfect idea. Not promising to resume when life becomes quieter. Writing.

On 9 February 2024, I chose a daily pace. Nine hundred and nineteen writing days later, I am still here, looking at the next post, the next old page that deserves another chance and the next new idea that was not present yesterday.

Tomorrow, I will do it again.

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)