A Year of Mondays

Written By Andy Scoles

Well, here we are: the last Monday of 2025!

A year ago, I was kicking myself. I had realized for the umpteenth time that no matter how often I’d tried to start writing and posting to my blog regularly, I’d never managed to do it.

I’ve had blogs on other internet sites before. I’ve had this website for a few years. But I’d never consistently used any of them as a creative outlet. My creativity was blocked by fear and laziness.

So in December 2024, I resolved to change that.

I had no idea what it would look like; I just knew I had to make a goal. That goal was simply to write and edit somethingand post it on my website by Monday night every week.

It didn’t really matter what I wrote. It didn’t really matter how many page views I got; I haven’t looked at my website analytics at all this year. I hoped somebody would read my work, though I didn’t count on it. (Thank you to those of you who have been reading!)

I made this challenge a yearlong resolution. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t even sure I could make that work, since I’d never done something like this before. Case in point, my post “Almost Didn’t” from January reflected my anxiety that I would fail this challenge within a month just like I’ve done in the past.

Once I got past January, the process of writing each week didn’t get easier—it just started to feel more possible. I would often breathe a sigh of relief after posting and sharing late on a Monday night, then completely forget that I needed to do it again until that Saturday, Sunday, or even the next Monday.

I daresay, the best things I wrote this year were not written in a hurry, and the final forms that went onto the blog often looked quite different from their first drafts. Unfortunately, despite how beneficial it is to take my time with the writing and editing process, I’m still a procrastinator; I wrote and posted on the same day more often than not.

And yet! I proved to myself I could adhere to my own deadline!

I’m not saying these things to pat myself on the back (well, maybe a little…). I’m saying them because I’m experiencing some incredulity that this year of writing and posting on my website is already done.

And I actually succeeded.

I didn’t do it by “believing in myself”, though. I did it by making a simple commitment, being accountable to other people, and sometimes pushing through at the last minute when all I wanted to do was go to bed. My stubbornness may have also played a role; I often feel like I have something to prove…to myself. And my faith also made a difference. Credit where credit’s due, God cleared away a lot of the negative thinking that was holding me back.

I posted every Monday (and in a couple cases, also on Tuesday), which means I now have over fifty-two pieces of written work on my website for this year alone. Hard to believe. It’s not all my best work, but it’s out there now. Perfectionism be darned.

I even started a Substack so I would have a simple and free way to share the links to people’s emails. That way, they wouldn’t have to rely on social media or a text from me to get the link, and I wouldn’t have to pay for an email service add-on for this website.

And now for the question I’ve been pondering for the last couple months:

What now?

Well, I’m not going to stop posting. That would defeat the purpose of a year’s worth of work developing a weekly habit. No, I’m going to continue posting on Mondays. It just might look a little different in the future.

For this challenge, I’ve been trying to stick to simple, low-risk topics, just to make things easy. As this year has progressed, I’ve had more ideas of things to write about than I’ve posted. I’ve had ideas of new topics to broach that might require their own medium or “brand”. I’ve had long-form ideas that wouldn’t work well as a five-to-seven-minute-read blog post. Most of these ideas haven’t left my Notes app or the daydream phase of planning. But I want to put all or most of them on a page, even if nobody but me ever sees some of them.

The internet is awash, swimming, drowning in content. And if I may make a corny joke, many people are not “content” with their “content.” I don’t want to add to the noise, noise, noise (cue annoyed Grinch face) of the internet, but I also want to take full advantage of the opportunities for artistic exposure that this digital frontier (to borrow a term from Tron) allows.

That means I have to be intentional about what I write and how. As a YouTube web series I recently watched reminded me: if it's on the internet, it’s there forever, so be careful what you decide to publish for all the world to see.

So, for those who are interested: look out for my upcoming projects. I still have some major decisions to make about what those projects will look like, but I’ll be making them soon. I have as much (or more) fear about them as I did about starting to post weekly on this website a year ago. I have not vanquished my perfectionism; it’s weaker, but still very much alive and throwing the occasional punch. Imposter syndrome may even decide to poke its head in the door and wag its finger, depending on how well my future content does.

A year of Mondays posting blogs on this website. It’s done! Goal met.

Here’s to another year of more Monday blogs of some kind, and hopefully some new creative adventures, too!

Thanks for reading!

Andy Scoles
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Three Years of Samwise