Three lessons I’ve learned as a new blogger

1. Write every day.

A writing habit makes posting much easier. By establishing a writing habit where I write for at least 15 minutes every morning, I am producing every day. I call these morning writing sessions freewrites — it’s low pressure, just whatever comes to my mind, as it comes.

These freewrites all have a different feel. Sometimes my fingers are flying across the keyboard, and I’m scrambling to get ideas down. Other times, I don’t have much content at all, or fill the page with nonsense like “jsnfkjsfnkj” (this is the equivalent of an expletive for a writer). But when freewrites have potential to be turned into a blog post, I nurture them, like a coach would nurture a talented athlete with Olympic promise. Yes, I personify a lot of things.

At the end of the day (literally), I’m just training myself to put down words that perform well and charge down the home stretch to the final punctuation mark. But I don’t judge myself if I spend the morning writing a paragraph of close-to gibberish, nor should you. They key is to keep the habit.

2. Simple format.

I like the clean and simple format of my blog: white background, chronological list of posts, one featured image per post. It makes it very clear where to go (i.e., check out one of my stories!), and the…