Is it the journey or the destination that is important

Okay, Today is the day people do New Year’s Resolutions.  They set goals.  But usually in a few days or weeks the resolutions and goals are gone.  Why? Well, in something I read earlier this week, it is because people concentrate on the goal, the destination, and ignore the process, the journey.

Personally I have never been one for setting resolutions, but I like this idea of focusing on the process, on the journey. I have destinations I  might like to see on the journey, but having Joy in the Journey is more important.

So today is going to be the first day of my new, expanded process for this blog. As Monday’s blog showed, my blog was quite erratic during 2013. A properly thought-out and implemented process should make the writing more consistent and worthwhile, in both quantity, content and regularity.

So, what will that system be? I’ve been thinking about various ideas, schedules, themes. I’d like something regular so I know what to do when I sit down to write. Yet I also have something against inflexibility. Finally, a system that lets me get an article out at any time of the day, even after a 12-hour work-day when the brain doesn’t have enough synapses to string two sentences together, that can give me a topic to work on without spending most of my time coming up with the topic.

For those of you (most of you) not acquainted with my background, back in the 90s I was a community reporter/editor at a newspaper in upstate New York. Community features, profiles,special section features. So event and feature writing is a strong suit.  Give me the bare bones facts and structure of an event and I can rip off an article, a blog, whether the synapses are fully charged or not. Only problem with that strategy is I don’t attend enough events to make this a regular feature.  After all, I am not the society reporter choosing between invitations.

Another strength the reporting gave was feature planning and series reporting.  That is why I enjoyed the Travelogue and Christmas Carol series in 2013.. Expect to see some themed series during the year.

I had floated the idea of having each day of the week be a different topic/theme. I have several general topics I write on, and rotating them on a schedule had some appeal. Church, Education, Family, Fitness, Music, Politics, Reviews, Social Issues, Travel. But I decided against a specific schedule, and decided to opt for just focusing on finding suitable topics for my areas of interest.

I expect to refine this process throughout the year. I also expect to just write.