Over the course of my sabbatical, despite initial enthusiasm and mind-map fun, I lost steam for the longstanding dream of writing a novel. The process seemed too complex and beyond the time and word count capabilities of a working dad with too many other hobbies.

However, as my obsessive blogging over the last couple of months has demonstrated, I’m capable of churning out a few words on the commute, on blog-friendly topics, AND research them, link to them, tweet about them etc. Out of curiosity as to exactly how prolific I had been, I installed a word count plugin, which revealed that, of the 210,000 words or so I’ve produced in the last 8 or so years of blogging, an astonishing 38,000 were produced in the last four months – 22,000 of which in the month and a half after I returned from sabbatical.

Which was a bit higher than I expected.

I might think about opening a new Evernote with story ideas and see if I can build up a head of steam blogging simple short stories… and if those go nowhere, finally write off [sic] the idea… I might even wheel out the writer’s block….