And so we come to the end, my friends. This article marks the 31st article I've written in 32 days, just one short of the 32 in 32 days that I had hoped to achieve, but getting withing spitting distance of the total is fine by me, especially since the last week has proven surprisingly tough on me in terms of writing.
This has been an experiment to try and expand my ability as a writer, to push me beyond my normal limitations and to see if I could consistently produce work of a reasonable or high quality over a prolonged period of time, and I think that I have achieved that, with a few notable exceptions, most of which occurred in the last week when, due to split loyalties between writing about films and actually making a film, I found myself unable to sit down and write with the level of concentration that I had otherwise managed.
Last weekend, which marked the first few days in which I was unable to get content up every day, didn't help, either. That slight trip has snowballed and very nearly derailed the whole endeavour, in the end only serving to make me miss the total by that much.
Now, I could just write a quick review of the last film I watched (which was The Descent which, whilst technically very good, didn't engage me in the way that I had hoped it would. I still really rate Neil Marshall as a director, though, and am eagerly anticipating the release of Centurion later this year) but I don't think that the review would be any good, given how frazzled I am at the moment from having spent 6 hours filming and editing, and I'd rather reach the total with something I'm proud of, rather than something hurriedly tossed off in order to meet a quota. Quality must win out over quotas, and if I fail because I couldn't think of something good to write, I'd rather do that than succeed with a poor piece of work.
Overall this little experiment has been good for me. I've gotten better at writing reviews quickly and succinctly without sacrificing depth, and I've tried my hand at a variety of different styles of article, rather than just sticking to the tried and tested reviews. I doubt I'll ever maintain that level of productivity again (unless I were to sit down and write a novel, which is different to writing a different article every day) but I am glad that I gave it a shot and that I didn't a) fail, or b) resort to producing sub-standard work just to reach my goal.
Maybe inspiration will come to me in the next 90 minutes, but if it doesn't, I'll just say that I enjoyed it immensely, and I look forward to not writing for a couple of days.