Listen to this post:
It’s funny, after you get into four-digit numbers, a hundred here or there doesn’t have the same impact. This is Day 2,200 of my 92-day challenge, the promise to myself back in 2020 that I would post something on this blog every day for at least three months. Seventy-two months is more than three.
I hit 2,100 consecutive daily posts on May 1, and while I usually check in when I reach a post that has two zeroes at the end, it just doesn’t feel as impressive as those posts with three zeroes, which only arrive every three years or so.
But this has been a pretty momentous 100 days.
I started reading again. Through the end of April, I had only read five books all year. That’s an abysmal number. I had been averaging more than a book a week for close to a decade before I tailed off and read only 31 books in 2025, but I was on track to finish 2026 with less than half of that sad number.
A guy who wants to write has to read. If you want your words to sing, you have to see how other conductors handle the orchestra. I knew one of my problems was that I had nearly stopped reading. And so I read five books in May, and 10 books in June, and five more in July. That felt better.
And maybe it showed and maybe it didn’t, but it felt like my writing got better as a result. After the anniversary of my last book release came and went, I started working harder on getting my next collection organized. I gave it a name — What I Came to Say — and stepped up my daily writing habit.
But I still was having trouble jumpstarting the daily writing habit I really wanted to practice — the storytelling. That breakthrough came this past week, and I wrote about that just a couple of days ago. Who would have thought the secret to writing stories was to stop talking about writing and just. start. writing? (Well, I think I reached that conclusion a long time ago, but saying and doing have always been two different things, haven’t they?)
If I ride the momentum from these past 100 days, then post number 2,300 should find us in the midst of all sorts of mischief and announcements and pronouncements, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. (And as anyone who has listened to my latest album knows, it doesn’t even matter if the creek rises or not.)
I really do hope to enjoy the rest of my life as a prolific and productive artist — how many good books can a guy put out starting at age 73? It’s a wonderful question to explore.
