Tomorrow is the second anniversary of 58keys, a YouTube series I do for writers like me who use and write on Macs, iPhones and iPads. If you don’t happen to write on those, 58keys is of no earthly use to you. But still, I want to share a general writing lesson I think I’ve learned from doing it.

And that’s just this: you can change what normal is.

I first thought of a YouTube channel in 2012 and even shot a couple of minutes of footage. I’m going to let myself off a little here by explaining that all I really had was an idea for one gag. Didn’t know what a channel of mine could be about, didn’t know what I’d be interested in, didn’t and really still don’t know what anyone watching could be interested in.

Nonetheless, for seven years I did bugger-all.

And even in mid- to late-2019, I did bugger-little. Shot a title sequence. Figured out what I could do. Chose the name 58keys. Now I write it down, that seems more than I thought, but really it was all held back by me being me. Until January 2020 when, little knowing what could possibly be ahead of us all, I was determined to launch the channel before the end of the month.

Today I am making some little money from it, but if that’s not the reason I do it now, it definitely wasn’t the reason I launched it on January 29, 2020. The sole and specific and exclusive reason I launched it was sheer frustration with myself for not doing it, for constantly putting off a writing job I wanted to do. I can be very unhappy with me, but this time I was angry.

So I launched it. Just to shut me up.

Somehow I got 7 subscribers in the first week. I’m now on 2,400 or so. In that same week, the watch time, the total time anyone played any video of mine, was 584 minutes, which would amaze me just as much if it were this week. Except I record the statistics at the end of each Friday and last week the total for the preceding seven days was 218.2.

Hours.

So that’s 13,092 minutes of me watched last week. Since I’ve got all of my statistics plus a pocket calculator, hang on one sec.

God in heaven. Since I began, the total watch time is 6,514,500 minutes. Six million minutes of watching me, that’s insane. I have a sudden urge to comb my hair.

And still it’s not what I learned, it’s not what I want to talk to you about. Nor is the money: YouTube pays less than you think. I’m getting between £20 and £40 per month, but then I also separately got a lot of funding about 17 months in, so the real per-month figure is considerably higher. There are also book sales that have come from it, and various courses I run. Plus I’ve just been booked to make a lot of videos for other companies.

No, truly, what I learned is this thing about the new normal.

There have been no breaks in the two years, no gaps, just at least one video every week. I’ve done extra editions in short runs so the total is 117 videos in 104 weeks. And now I know that there will be a 118th next week, 119th the week after. It’s still the same amount of work, it’s still the same amount of effort, but the doubt is gone. I don’t doubt that I’ll do another video, because I no longer think about whether I should doubt, or at least not as much.

For better or worse, for as small as my channel is compared to others, for as little as it pays directly compared to the time it takes me, 58keys is now a normal part of my working life.

And since I’ve scripted at least 90 of those episodes, writing non-fiction YouTube scripts is also a normal part of my working life now. That’s been startling: I can see my scriptwriting is better than it was, which had been an aim but I hadn’t guessed how very much I would feel it would help me.

You can very easily argue that there are other things I could put the effort in to, but I don’t think you can argue that writing effort is not being made. Or that things are happening because of it.

Which all gives me encouragement just where I need some.

It encourages me because there are other things I have put off, there are other things that I want to write, other areas I want to write in, other failings that make me angry at myself on the hour and the half-hour. There are areas where I feel both that I am starting from scratch and that I should have started a long, long time ago.

Can’t do anything about what I haven’t done, but I can pull my bloody finger out and make these new areas be part of my normal working life.