Jennifer Clark Tinker Living Faith

Despite the necessity for typing most of my writing on a computer, I prefer to start a writing project “old school,” writing longhand with a notepad and pen. This collection of supplies was from my son for Christmas.

This is the end of my first calendar year of blogging. As 2013 comes to a close I thought it would be fun to take a look back.

My 2013 started with a decision–that I’m doing this writing thing. I knew how to write, but wasn’t too sure about how to be “successful” with it.

I kept looking around at friends and people I admire gaining ground with their writing and I got so jealous. I started taking stock of what they were doing with their writing that I wasn’t with mine. And a couple things emerged as trends:

1. They were writing–daily.
2. They had blogs that they kept up with.

I know there’s more to writing than just these two things, but these were the glaringly obvious things that they were doing that I wasn’t.

So along with my decision to do this writing thing, in 2013 I started writing every day and I started this blog.

I’ve been all over the place in post frequency (though never less than weekly). And I’ve tried out various topics and styles of posts.

In a very real sense, I’m making this up as I go along. But the more I go along, somehow the more confidence I gain.

I never want to get too comfortable with my work because I always want to remain open to growth…yet the evil second-guessing that tries to hold me back has diminished significantly. The voices that try to tell me I’m no good and my thoughts don’t matter are more and more drowned out by the ever-increasing number of ideas of what else I need to say.

So, I am doing this writing thing and I can’t get enough of it!

Since no calendar-year-in-review post would be complete without some numbers & lists, I thought I’d share some of that here too.

• The blog is averaging 577 visitors per month.
• It’s averaging 1009 page views per month.
• There have been a total of 10,096 page views on the blog.
• The most page views on a single day was 416.
• The most-viewed post has had 597 page views.
• The blog has been viewed from 66 different countries.
• Visitors have come from 6 different continents.

The top 10 most-viewed posts have been:

1. Eat, Sleep Preach: A Deaconess in Depression
2. Confessions of a Lutheran Charismatic
3. Stuff You Learn After You Say “I do”
4. Infertility Interrupted
5. Why I Love Conferences Even Though I’m an Introvert
6. The More Different We Are, The More We Need Each Other
7. When “Christ vs. Culture” Met My Music Collection
8. I’m Thrilled to Announce My First Podcast at “Life and Liberty”
9. How I Became a Deaconess
10. I Used to Go Barefoot

Thanks for coming on this journey with me and for helping make 2013 a great starting year for the blog!