It’s quickly approaching that time of year again where we replace the calendars (if you still use dead trees for that kind of stuff). It’s also when those who observe start their Christmas shopping. What, you already started?!?!?! Overachievers. Anyway… along with the New Year, comes the famously proclaimed but hardly every applied New Year’s Resolution. It’s been a while since I’ve done one but this year, I resolve to carry out a resolution: Get back to being healthy.

Many life altering and disrupting things happened this year – and more altering and disrupting is on the way. Some of the changes were bad… some good. But the result of all this upheaval is I stopped going to the gym and starting eating poorly again. And while I’ve tried to make up for past bad behavior, I haven’t fully enacted a plan to reclaim my health and physique from days of yore. That changes now – a whole two weeks early! Who’s the overachiever now?!?!? But I’ve already started… so it’s not a resolution I’m starting in the New Year.

What I want to change this year is my writing prowess. Starting with this post, I want to see how well I can write a typical “blog” post and see how I can stack up with the pros. My guess is that I can’t and that my ability to crank out a steady stream of words will not be as successful as I really want it to be. But I’m not giving up before I start. I’m slowly going to build up to a respectable level of posts per week to see if the skill can continue to develop into the following year.

So starting in January, I’m going to write a medium-ish length post on something – a product review, a discussion on something in the news, or a general update on how I’m feeling – something personal, perhaps – per week so that the total number of published articles equals the month number. Confused? Yeah, me, too. What it means that for every week I’ll be writing one article per week in January and two per week in February. Then three per week in March and so on until I’m churning out 12 posts per week in December.

Of course, I might have to vary the length at times but the goal is to test my chops at professional blogging. Not that I’ll ever make a living off of it. I love my current job and company and I don’t want to do anything to get in the way of that. But I’d like to think I have a creative streak in me that could be more than just thoughts in my head. If I can swing it, I’d like to at least one “in-depth” article of some kind to test my journalistic chops.

In case you were wondering, this post doesn’t count towards my goal; I’m not starting this resolution early. But I will try to stick to a regular schedule and spread my writings across several days as I start writing 5 articles a week. Not sure if I’ll have a column that appears on a particular day every week or if I’ll make them somewhat random. But I think, like most things I do, I’ll dive into it and see if I can swim my way through the sea of writing. Thus far, I haven’t been so successful but if I spin this as a self fulfilling and enriching activity – much like getting back to the gym – I can pull this off.

So I’ll take suggestions on what to write about in the comments. I’m also looking for advice from my professional blogger friends and journalists (which is pretty much just one person). But still, the advice and feedback is much appreciated no matter if you’re a “professional” at something. The help in achieving this goal is much appreciated.

Now to think about what I should write about two weeks from now.