I set a goal for myself, at the beginning of the year, of writing two entries in my writing diary per week over 2025, so 104 entries. At the moment, the count stands at 82. I didn’t quite make it, but this year was still one of my most productive, and I had a lot of fun with my writing, especially with my poetry. This post will discuss how I keep track of my writing, followed by reflections on my output for the year.
I use Obsidian for all of my note taking and drafting. For my writing
diary, I have a directory, writing/diary, divided into
directories by year. For each year, I include a summary.md
file, which I write code in using dataview.js, a plugin for
Obsidian that allows you to programmatically access the document API
Obsidian uses. I take advantage of Obsidian’s YAML frontmatter support
to put all sorts of data into my diary entries:
By default I parse my titles, which are in the format
YYYY-MM-DD title for easy sorting alphabetically, to figure
out the day of the entry. If there is a sessions list
attribute in a file’s frontmatter, that is used instead, taking
advantage of moment which Obsidian itself seems to depend
on. I then aggregate entries by date and category, e.g. give me all
files marked with form: sonnet and sort them by date, then
title. dataview.js thinks in terms of queries, even if
you’re not using it’s SQL-like syntax. Makes a lot of sense to me.
I also put together this year a simple chart showing progress throughout the year.
Integrating dataview with a chart layout plugin made this quite easy. As you can see, I was pretty inconsistent, at least after February. I had a period of high productivity starting at the end of July and running through August. During that period I wrote a few short chapters of a novel set in the BattleTech universe. I’d still like to continue with that, but I think I’d better write a short story set in the same universe first. I read a handful of BattleTech books this year, and while I mostly find them boring, I think I could do something fun with all the giant robots and so on. There was fairly little poetry being written during this time, which makes it even more anomalous seeing how strongly my output tended toward poetry over the year.
My interest in sonnets continued this year, but less strongly than last year. I wrote 26 haiku, a small handful of sonnets, including a pair of sonnets called On Grossbeerenstrasse, and a bunch of other miscellany. In all I wrote about 22000 words this year. Doesn’t feel like enough, and a little behind last year, but nevertheless a good year for me. Next year, I will likely keep the target of 104 entries in my diary, and add a word count of 30k words. Seems achievable.
Writing is a tough and lonely activity. You get very little encouragement, and it’s hard to find readers. Still, the chance of reaching someone, communicating something beyond what can be communicated in, say, conversation, is really exciting to me. I’m looking forward to another year of scribbling.
