Sunday Confession: I suck with my personal writing goal, but my blog has improved.

I haven't been doing my own creative writing.

I know. I said I was going to. I made a goal. But I didn't reach it. At all this week.

So what now? Do I throw in the towel? No. I'm not going to. But I am going to consider making my goal a more reachable feat. 1000 words, not including my blog and freelance writing, is just too much for me right now. I'm knocking down my daily goal to 250 words a day. Until I can get used to THAT, then I'll consider bumping up my goal again.

I really enjoy running this blog, but it has taken up a ton of my time this month. Not that I don't enjoy it, I do. Good news is that ever since I figured out a schedule for the blog, I have been able to at least manage my time a little better. I think the first week with the new schedule went off without a hitch. The blog's still new, but it's finally maturing.

I spent so much time online, researching on how to do this stuff right. Reading on how to design my blog, etc. Playing in gimp to make these awesome buttons:

<br /><a href="http://lariswriting.blogspot.com"><img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-VC0da2qqFuc/TivGiKgk1vI/AAAAAAAACQ0/Q3oPQ9D68Hg/lariiswritingbuttonblog.png" border="0" /></img src="https:></a>

And after spending COUNTLESS hours messing with the coding for sharing buttons and the look and feel, and making my eyes squint and water from staring at the computer screen, I think I got it. I love how my blog looks now and I got the "feel" I wanted from the get go. My next goal with the blog is organizing the blogs I'm interested in, so stay tuned. The categories I'm considering for organizing blogs I like are the following (the librarian in me is showing):

Librarian Blogs - For blogs by librarians (includes librarian book blogs)
Book Blogs - For blogs devoted solely to books
Writer Blogs - For blogs by writers and for writers
Writer and Book Blogs - For blogs for and by writers and book lovers
Misc. Blogs - Fun stuff

I'm also changing my blog's comment structure to Disqus either today or tomorrow, to enable better discussions on the blog.

So that's one thing I'm proud of this week. My coding skills and blog design. I'm also proud of my recent library advocacy post. It got a ton of hits and retweets and gave me hope that people are still invested in their local library.

Does anyone have any comments or suggestions for what they'd like to see here? What's working? What do you like so far?


Also, I'm considering doing guest posts in the near future. Contact me if you are interested in guest posting here with the article topic or review you'd like to share here.