Tag: Daily writing

6 Months of Writing

General

Six months ago yesterday, I started writing daily. Although in the beginning I sometimes fell short, I mostly kept my committment to writing at least 500 words a day. For the longest time, I posted what I wrote. Recently, because I wanted to focus on writing and not necessarily posting, I stopped sharing my daily writings but I have kept up the streak.

Last night, curious about how much I’ve done, I sat down and added it all up. I wanted to mark the milestone. Because I do my writing in Writer, a distraction-free online text editor, I didn’t have an easy way to add up the word count. I had to do it manually, which was a bit of a pain. Luckily I only have to do that part once because now it’s all in a tidy spreadsheet.

I have written, in 6 months of intentional, habitual practice, just over one hundred thousand words. In fact, yesterday I passed that mark; the total as of last night is 100,323 words.

I was proud, and it made me cry a bit. That’s a lot of words. 100,323 divided by 182 days means an average of about 551 words a day. That daily number is easy enough to reach; clearly I can do it because I have done it. But 100K? That feels like a stretch. But I have demonstrated that I can do that, too.

Not every daily piece of writing is good writing. And they are not all on the same topic. Each one is whatever I wanted to write at the moment I sat down. Some of it is garbage (by my personal standards) and some of it is good (also by my own internal measure) but all of it is mine.

Is it time to ask a new question? Build on my success? Perhaps, perhaps. The obvious next step would be, can I do my daily writing towards a goal other than word count? Could I tell one continuous narrative?

I don’t know. Can I?

One Hundred and Fifty Days In A Row

meta

Tonight I’ve reached 150 days in my daily posting streak. And, dagnabit, I don’t know what to write about. There’s still all of XOXO to process, for sure, but for some reason tonight I am not able to focus on that. I’m probably playing a D&D one-shot tomorrow, but if I write about that freely, there’s a chance I’ll spoil something for my players, who may or may not read my blog. Had an interesting interaction with my boss today but, yeah, also, there I’m not sure I want to expose that publically.

There’s the volatile political situation in my city, country, and the world. But wow do I feel ill-equipped to write about that coherently. I have my leftist views that color how I see the world, but I doubt I’d be able to pursuade anyone else one way or the other.

So what is left to write about? What is worthy of being the topic of my 150th post in a row? Damned if I know. And that’s part of the problem of my streak.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this previously, probably even recently: I can sit down and bang out 500 words, no problem. It’s just typing practice. I can produce clean, grammatical, correctly-spelled sentences and paragraphs, and most of the time those sentences and paragraphs revolve around a single specific theme. But are they good? Is it worth posting those? That’s the part I am not one hundred percent certain of.

I’d rather only post the good stuff. To do that, I still need to write every day. So that’s going to be a thing going forward. I will still sit down to a blank screen and bang out about 500 words. And when those 500 words mean something, or describe something beautiful, or interesting, or meaningful, or personal, or informative, I will post it here. If it doesn’t, I will still have kept up my streak, I will still feel like I’m progressing as a writer by exploring the ins and outs of constructing themes, scenes, stories, characters, and dialogue. I will still have shown up, which is the most important thing.

I have set myself a very high bar by never focusing this blog on any one specific topic, theme, or niche (I cringe to use that word but I am not sure of another that doesn’t have the stench of marketing and still conveys the same idea.) And because of that, when I want to write a post, I need to pull a topic out of thin air, or have one already in mind. That’s a problem if I feel the pressure to post or lose my streak. As you can tell by the fact that this post is similar to several others I’ve posted over the past 150 days, I fall into a rut. I don’t want that to happen.

I can still use this space to inform, share, and reveal things about myself without it being at least 500 words on a specific topic. I can post that I’ve done my writing for the day. I can share links to cool things on the internet. I can call out heroes and villains in the world. I can share pictures or even videos. I will still post daily; it just won’t always be longish posts. And hopefully the act of finding and sharing those kinds of things will feed my creativity and give me new ideas for the wordy posts.

Thank you for reading and thank you for sticking around. Lunar Obverse lives on, and on, and on.