Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Day One: A Year Long Challenge


The other day, I drove to Target for a couple of items.  Looking for a notebook for a coming workshop, I saw a journal with the title 300 Writing Prompts.  I thought of my friend, David, posting a daily music video everyday for a year.  When he started, I thought the idea was marvelous.  I envied and admired his daring to do such a challenge.  With that in mind, I spontaneously bought the book. 

My internet mentor, Dean Wesley Smith, talks about challenges and streaks in writing all the time.  I have done a number of challenges.  Every November, I do the 50,000 word challenge.  Last fall, I did Dean's challenge of writing three novels in three months.  Now granted, I worked on one novel, but I used the same word count of at least 90,000 words in that amount of time.  Each challenge has been a learning experience.  Sitting here, writing all of this, I realize that I need to do a challenge for a year.  Will I succeed?  Maybe not, but hey, I won't learn anything if I don't try. 

Of course, here I sit, anxiously waiting to go to Las Vegas in two days.  I am not able to focus on book 5 because I know I will be so busy.  I am attending a workshop that Dean and a number of other professionals are doing.  That is why I grabbed the journal from my bag.  I thought this might be an easy enough topic to do some sort of writing play this afternoon.  But is this really the time to start a challenge?  I will be traveling and in class for seven days.  Can I do blog posts while on the run?  I really need to start trying.  I know days off are a good thing.  But challenging oneself is also good.  I am going to go for it.  Besides, if I know that the week will be chaos, I can always do a couple of blogs ahead of time and post them in five minutes.  Yep, I am going to try.  Stay tuned.  Today is day one.

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