At the beginning of the year I made 11 New years resolutions: one for each month (except December, because I’m always flat-out at the end of the year).  Each month I recap how went with achieving my goal for that month.

This month, my resolution was to finish a big writing project.  I’ve been working on a project for my blog for the last eight months or so, and I had decided that July would be the month that I would finish it.

Well, I failed spectacularly.  I’ve nearly finished the actual writing part, but I haven’t even begun to tackle the task of editing, formatting and all that junk.

There are a couple of reasons why I’ve really stalled with this project.  The first is that I’m struggling with my separation from Ross.  It’s been a very rough month for me emotionally and I just haven’t felt up to the task of working on my project.  I didn’t want to force myself to work when my heart wasn’t in it.  I knew that I just wouldn’t produce my best work in that way, so I’ve kind of put the project on the back burner for the time being.

Another reason why I’ve struggled to gain momentum with this project is that I’m having second thoughts about my blog.  For the past three years, I’ve worked really hard on my blog.   My goal was to be able to generate an income stream from my website.  Ideally, I wanted to be able to make enough to live off, but I would have settled for a little bit of pocket money.  Over the last month, I’ve come to realise that it isn’t going to happen.  While I do make some money from my blog, I don’t make anywhere near enough to achieve that goal.  I get the occasional sponsored post, a smattering of sidebar ads and every now and then someone buys one of my e-books.  The truth is that I’m exhausted from the amount of effort I’m putting into fuelling the business side of my blog.  The effort I’m putting in is disproportionate to the amount of cash I get out of it.  And it’s really wearing me down.  So I’ve decided that I need to put the brakes on when it comes to blogging.

I’m not going to stop blogging.  No way!  I adore writing in this space and connecting with people from all over the world.  I’m truly grateful to all the readers that visit every day and leave beautiful comments.  I’m also grateful for all those readers who have shown their support by buying e-books or sponsoring my blog.  But the truth is I’m finding it really hard to put the effort into creating yet another product that I fear will generate only a handful of sales.

So that’s where I’m at right now.  I will probably keep working on the project, and eventually it will be released for sale.  I’m just not prepared to push myself so hard to churn it out while I’m not really up to the task of producing my best work.

So this month’s resolution was a bit of a flop.  But I did achieve some other things this month, like cutting my hair and taking some steps towards getting my driver’s licence.  So even though I didn’t reach the goal I’d set, I did some other useful things instead.