New year, new me? Or new year, same me, but doing things a little differently?
Whatever way you look at it, we’ve rolled the calendar over into 2023 and it’s time to start afresh. 2022 is done and dusted and with a blank journal in front of me (hello, Moleskine), it’s time to start into the year as I mean to go on – with a boatload of content and getting back in the swing of regular writing.
How better to kick-start it all than with a 30-day challenge to get my own personal content creation back in the swing of things?
2022 was a reasonable year for KilkennyMusic.com, once an action-packed force of life that’s become more of an intermittent blog on what’s happening on the music scene in Kilkenny, highlighting gigs and marquee events in Kilkenny across the year. However, once the festival season started to relax and the sporting world started to take off with the club championships, music coverage went out the window. Looking back at my own gig diary, outside of festival events I think I managed to get to just one show locally in the past 12 months when that number would have been as high as 40-50 in years previous.
Ken On Food too took something of a serious back seat, showing its head above the parapet in October (as it usually does) with the return of Savour Kilkenny for the first time in person in three years, before slipping back into the shadows in the run-in to Christmas. Even here, things have been very much on the quiet front
These are things that I’ve missed and have been gnawing away at me
How does the challenge work?
This one is straightforward enough. Write 30 blog posts in 30 days, with the added stipulation that it can’t be connected to work output. That means food, music, technology, content creation, gaming, you name it.
By the time 31 January comes around, I should have a post published here that contains links to 30 articles written and published throughout January. One a week from the three blogs mentioned above should yield 12 between now and the end of the month. Seeing where the other 18 go is another matter, but that’s the fun in it.
To help matters along, I’ve also put together some course content around blogging and podcasting which I’ll be releasing via a revamped kenmcguire.ie (where the more serious content hangs out), with 2022 having been a big year on the podcasting front thanks to the growth of The Football Manager Football Show.
In a way, it’s also a useful tool to see what can be sustained over the course of a week, a fortnight, a month, without creating content for the sake of it. As much as I love some of these blogs, sites and projects, and will likely add some more, there’s also got to be a sense of purpose here and if the commitment can’t be made to the content for particular blogs, then maybe it’s time to wave goodbye to them. A challenge with a spring clean at the same time? It might just work.
30 articles, 30 days, simple – right? It sounds achievable but I’m also keenly aware that it takes planning, patience, content, time, space, availability and the rest. I’m seeing this year as a big year on the content front so why not start things off on the front foot? Let’s meet back here in four weeks’ time and see how things have progressed.
