This blog began as a monthly newsletter. On my 49th birthday, I set out keep a journal every day, every day of my 50th year. The goal was to have it be witty, insightful, and wise reflecting on just about everything. My goal was to publish and become a notable writer to the point where that would be my full time profession.
It was a great and noble plan but for one thing.
In short, the writing was not good. There were witty, insightful, and wise moments here and there. But, the writing, for the most part, was whiney not witty, whiney and not consistently insightful, and lastly, there were only a few pearls of wisdom. In a given month of writing about 500 words per day, there was maybe 2-4 days of writing (~1000-2000 words) worth sharing. After a year, I was wondering what to do with all this writing. I came up with the monthly e-letter based on the monthly letters of Aram J. Kevorkian. My monthly e-letters began in February 2004. In that first letter, I wrote:
Yet, as with all of my endeavors, there have been unexpected benefits. In this case, this daily writing routine is so worthwhile that I plan to continue with it as long as I can. I had realized over the past several years, that my intellect had grown stagnant and that I was actually having difficulty expressing myself clearly. In writing every day, I have found, or at least imagined which can be just as good, that I am more articulate, clear and fluent. I have found both speaking and writing to be easier than ever. Thankfully, instead of being on the road to senility, I was just losing what I was not using. Upon exercising the mind everyday, surprise, surprise, it began to work better.
For this daily writing regimen, I only wrote by hand versus typing. Why handwriting? First, I loved pens and wanted to put my collection of fine writing instruments to good use. More importantly, I had read enough about the mental benefits of handwriting as summarized by Google Gemini: “Handwriting engages broader brain networks, enhances memory retention, and forces deep conceptual processing, whereas typing offers superior speed, efficiency, and easy digital searchability. [1, 2, 3, 4]”
My intention was to handwrite every day until I was physically unable.
Well, it was an intention. I dutifully followed that intention until 2009 when I moved the monthly e-letter, that I emailed to family and friends, to this blog. As my writing improved, I abandoned the notion of one monthly letter and began posting more often. The more frequent posts tended to be shorter than the e-letters averaging 500-1000 words each. As I was also using an I-Pad more, I began to gravitate to typing because of the “superior speed, efficiency, and easy digital searchability.” It was easier to type and post. Plus, professional writers mostly type, so why not.
In 2009, I posted 13 posts and then over 40 posts a year thereafter with the exception of the drought years 2015 (29), 2016 (18), and 2017 – a lowly 9 posts – as I was learning to be a full-time college professor. In 2022, I posted 100 times. This was also a year where I wrote the least number of handwritten pages.
In 2025 (44) and 2026 (12 ytd), my writing productivity dipped. The decrease was due to two related reasons. First, I was a little upset by the notion that there was a strong urge in me to use AI to increase productivity. That really bothered me because I wanted it to be my writing and not Google Gemini’s or ChatGPT’s. Secondly, because of this desire to not let AI do my writing, I shifted my writing focus to poetry which there was zero urge to use any AI. I have been writing poetry for many years. From 2010-2024, I have averaged about 8 poems per year. Poetry productivity (dang I sound like such an Ops Management professor LOL) has skyrocketed to 44 in 2025 and 53 ytd in 2026.
On June 1st of this year, I made a conscious decision to restart the daily handwriting regimen. I miss that practice, that discipline, and the mental clarity it brought. In just two months, it has paid the same dividends as the first go around.
There are more topics I want to write about and post here on this blog and I feel lot less urge to save time by having AI do most of the writing. I will use AI to enhance things and do research, as I have in this post, but I want the writing to be my voice and not just a copy/paste of the output from some data center.
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