James Proclaims!

As I write this, I find myself running the risk of not completing the feat of 30 consecutive daily posts throughout November. I am currently 47 minutes away from December, with only 29 posts in the bag.

It shouldn’t matter. 29 posts in a month is relatively good in the world of blogging, and I’ve achieved far greater consecutive daily posting runs than 30 posts in 30 days. But prior to this November, 2025 was running the risk of being a particular low for me in terms of output on these pages, and that in itself is quite an impressive rock-bottom after a fairly unimpressive 2024. To be fair to 2024, it had sort of marked a bit of resurgence in comparison to 2023 and 2022, when, aside from my annual Christmas movie advent calendar, I’d appeared to have given up blogging completely.

But I’d had pretty high hopes for 2025 in terms of blogging, and I had truly planned to get back to the kind of output I’d been enjoying fairly consistently between 2015 and 2018. I did drop off a bit in 2018 and really only rediscovered my blogging mojo in 2020, thanks to a certain pandemic. That was a golden time for blogging, mainly because it was a dreadful time for pretty much everything else. I am generally a better writer when I’m miserable.

I’m not miserable at the moment. Exhausted and stressed in equal measure, and I certainly wouldn’t say life is without it’s challenges. Mainly though, the challenges are as a direct result of being a father to a seven-year-old and a three-year-old. It’s no coincidence that my 2018 ‘drop off’ in blogging was as a result of the arrival of my eldest daughter, and daughter number two appearing is almost certainly when the 2022 blogging absence began. In the main, though, being a dad makes me happy. Just a very tired kind of happy.

Spending the weekend with my daughters, visiting my homeland of Wales, is why I find myself almost missing the end of November deadline for my thirtieth post of the month. The twenty-nine preceding posts have already assured that 2025 is no longer my worst ever blogging year in terms of content production, but I do still want to hit the milestone of posting every day. If nothing else, November was, once upon a time, the month of consecutive blogging, when bloggers the world over consoled themselves on their failure to complete a novel through the NaNoWriMo challenge by instead completing the NaBloPoMo challenge. Apparently neither NaNoWriMo nor NaBloPoMo are actually ‘things’ anymore, with the former ceasing to be a going concern last year and the latter not really being a thing for quite a lot longer. However, something not being a thing has never discouraged me from doing it, any more than something being a thing has ever especially encouraged me to get involved.

So I have written 30 posts in 30 days throughout November 2025 because it still seemed like a thing worth doing even if it isn’t. And given that most of my posts were syllable-based poetry, which don’t even meet the rules of the kind of poetry that they are supposed to be, none of it was worth doing at all.

But I still did it. And doing something that was never worth doing has always been the true spirit of this blog, so I’m pretty happy that I did it.

Tomorrow, December begins, although as I write this sentence, that’s only about 20 minutes away in my time zone. December has been the one month I’ve managed to post regularly every year since 2017, as a result of the entirely pointless aforementioned Christmas movie advent calendar. In the years when my blog was active all year round, that was always the least popular thing I did, yet it’s the thing that has endured when all else has failed and so in recent years, purely because of the absence of anything else on offer, it has, by default, become the most popular thing on my blog.

I only manage to keep it going because I wrote most of the posts for this year’s advent calendar, (and those for quite a few more years into the future) several years ago.

Thanks to NotNaNoBloPo, I’ve also written some other stuff this year, but the advent calendar will begin tomorrow anyway. Nothing can stop that now.

Well I could stop it.

But I won’t.