2025 was a great year for me personally: I travelled far, took lots of photos, and got obsessive about tracking the many species I was interacting with.

However, that meant it wasn’t such a great year for the blog - in fact, for the first time I was under 30,000 words for the year. I’d like to change that, and so have a few grand goals for 2026.

Three main areas

There are a few main areas I know I’d like to write a lot about:

  1. Reaching ten years post-religion: In May, it will be ten years since I quit religion. I’ve been thinking for a while that would be a good milestone to write a post on how it’s going. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to realise that even if I could somehow manage to fit everything I wanted to write about, it would be a monster post that no-one would read.

    That means I’ll want at least a few “religion” posts in the lead up to the anniversary. The truth is, though, there are many posts on religion that I’ve been wanting to write for years and haven’t quite got to. I don’t really expect 2026 to be different, and I’m certainly not expecting to write my magnum opus and then never write about religion again. But we’ll see how I go in the next few months.

  2. European travel: I mentioned that I went travelling last year. To be precise, I spent 11 weeks in countries surrounding the European Alps. I walked in snow, hiked the Bear Trek, and probably visited more decorative castles and churches than I have in the rest of my life. And, like my previous North American trip, I came back with lots of things I wanted to write about. I wrote drafts and published my monthly posts on a variety of train trips across the continent. And I definitely want to keep going. Whether it’s travelling as an Australian in kangaroo-free Austria, Jerome’s pet lion, the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, the frolics of Sherlock Holmes, the etiquette of photography or the horrors of the Holocaust, there was so much to see and to do, then to process and ideally to share.

    If you’d asked me when I got back in October, I’d probably have expected to start on this before the end of the year. Why haven’t I, you ask? Well, I wanted to write the perfect introductory post first (got to get these things in the right order, y’know!). Once I’ve done that I’m sure I’ll be setting Jerome’s pet lion on Holmes or Mahler any day…

  3. Sharing animal encounters: For at least the last few years I’ve been trying to find ways to share more of the photos I take (with mixed success…). Then sometime in January last year I resolved to do one animal encounter post a month. That plan resulted in at least a dozen suitable animal encounters - none of which got past the “rough notes” stage.

    Why not? Mostly because I got stuck on writing the perfect introductory post first (sensing a pattern here?) I had several drafts of it before I went to Europe, but couldn’t get it to “done”, and I’ve hardly touched it since. Perhaps I’ll be able to publish it one day, or perhaps I’ll cannibalise bits of it and use them in other drafts.

    The thing is - I don’t really need the perfect introduction post. It’s enough to say that I spend a lot of time in nature, and while there I have lots of fun and/or interesting experiences that I’d like to share, usually with photos to go with them. I also hope that writing about individual encounters will make it manageable enough that I actually get some published…

    When I set the goal last year, I was thinking of my November 2024 post “A duckling finds its way”. And I’ve actually already kicked it off this year with my new year post, based on a couple of animal encounters on New Year’s Day. Hopefully there will be more such posts in 2026…

A reality check

Realistically, I know that I’ll struggle to do justice to even one of these three areas. For years it’s been common for me to have only one post a month. So achieving all three goals is a massive stretch. That doesn’t stop me wanting to do it.

I also know that I’m probably going to find other things I want to write about during the year (even if they’re likely to end up as yet more rough drafts rather than as published posts). Other such posts probably should take a back seat to these three priorities, particularly in the lead-up to the May “religion” post. But we’ll see if they actually do.

Coming up for ten years of blogging

In December, it will be ten years since I first started this blog. I still like having it, but in recent years the main thing that has kept it going is my “one post a month” rule. I definitely plan to keep that up for the rest of the year, but I want to go further.

What I’d actually like is to get back to the “60,000 words, 300 photos” mark. Again, I don’t know how achievable it actually is - but writing about religion is likely to help the word count, while sharing animal encounters should help with the photo count.