This post may be shameless self-promotion.

Or perhaps this post is a best-practices memo disguised as shameless self-promotion, or vice versa.

In any case, today marks the end of six months since I challenged myself to write a blog post every day for three months, through the end of October. Something new has appeared on this website for 184 consecutive days, twice my original intention.

The purpose of the blog, like all of my writing, is to encourage, entertain and enlighten you, my readers. I hope every day that you come away from this place encouraged, entertained, enlightened, or a combination of those things.

Of course, its purpose also is to give you a free sample of the kind of material you may also purchase collected in book form. It’s a gentle reminder that I’ve written those books and would be very pleased to sell you one or more.

The purposes of the challenge were to give you a reason to keep checking back to see what that rascal Bluhm has produced lately, and of course to motivate me to produce something more consistently than I had been.

Continuing the challenge for twice as many months as I planned was a not-unexpected result. I’ve always wanted to blog daily, and I saw the challenge as a way to jumpstart that desire into reality.

There was, however, a second result that I did not expect. It has to do with those books I was hoping to sell you.

Simply put, I have significantly more to sell than I had before. While writing blog posts every day, I’ve also produced additional books, more accessible print-to-demand versions of several of my earlier works, and a couple of extremely short ebooks.

Here’s a list of what is available that was not available when I challenged myself to write every day for three months:

Gladness is Infectious: A Book of Celebrations (print and ebook)

24 flashes, a collection of two dozen flash-fiction pieces and short stories (print and ebook)

Emerging from Dystopia, four short essays on that topic (ebook)

de Neuvillette’s Confession, a standalone short story (ebook)

And updated print editions with expanded distribution of:

Myke Phoenix: The Complete Novelettes

A Bridge at Crossroads: 101 Encouragements

Resistance to Civil Government by Henry David Thoreau

Letters to the Citizens of the United States by Thomas Paine

A Little Volume of Secrets (As A Man Thinketh, Acres of Diamonds, and The Science of Getting Rich)

Last but not least, I’m finding time nearly every day to add words to a novel-in-progress and dabble in a little extra short-story writing. And by the way, I still have two part-time day jobs, one working for somebody else and one small local news business.

This may be bragging on myself — I always feel self-conscious writing stuff like this — but I want the would-be writers among my readers especially to take note: By challenging myself to one specific bit of writing (the blog) every day, as a side effect I somewhat dramatically increased my output in the other bits of my writing-and-publishing adventure.

And so I encourage you to challenge yourself to write a little something every day, in hopes your results enlighten and entertain you as much as mine have these past six months.