Life, The Universe, and Everything (3/13)

So I gave myself the challenge of doing this for 40 days and then I hit 42 days and didn't notice, and then life got crazy and so I stopped. This is fun! Just wrote a journal about this process and emotions about it and working through stuff in therapy!

        Whoops, where did I go?

The timing is suspicious, after I vomit out thousands of words about Korra I stop posting. Was the impression that I was like Mozart dictating the Confutatis, and once finished no longer had the strength in my body to continue, and thus faded away?

This “challenge”, experiment, whatever, was only originally supposed to be for 2 weeks. One week writing a thousand words a day, one week doing the same and then posting them on my story for people to see. I was enjoying it so much that extended the challenge to try and do this for 40 days; 40 days of 1,000 words each. I considered stretching it to 50 initially but that particular juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. An additional 10 days, on top of a very hectic personal/work life the last few weeks didn’t seem worth it. So I took a one day break to collect myself and thought I’d count up the posts I’d made (Both in my personal journaling and posting to the blog). Just to get some barometric measurements on my progress.

Turns out I had written 42! My finish line had come and gone and I hadn’t noticed because I was too caught up in the process to pay attention to the goal. Which on one hand is great! On the other hand, with a lot of stuff going on and new work stuff (Positive work stuff which makes me very happy and I might write about the specifics of it more some day!) I just didn’t have the same time to dedicate to it. And I knew that phoning it in would just be miserable because I wouldn’t be doing it for any “real” reason. To hit 50 days? A goal I hadn’t given myself, the crossing of which has no impact on me or my life? I’d written 106 pages and 52,951 words in a month and change. That’s nothing to sneeze at!

So continuing felt like needless self flagellation, meant to deprive the previous 42 days of any meaning or positive feeling because I didn’t cross the new finish line I felt I “had” to cross. Nobody is keeping track of it but me. No one cares but me. And if they do care, who cares? Not I, said the bird. I’m doing this to drag my atrophied writing muscles into some semblance of shape, and I did that. There’s no one but me pushing to have gotten to 50, and there’s no one but me mad at me for not doing it.

I also didn’t make any sort of announcement post because it felt lame to say “Oh I hit my number of 40 a few days ago and now it’s over. Bye!”. It’s a sort of dull wet thud to go out on. The millions of people who read this blog would be wailing and gnashing their teeth if I ended so abruptly, so I spared their feelings and tried to keep everyone from getting mad at me for stopping by just not saying I was.

Anyways if you can’t tell I started therapy on Monday and am actively working to disentangle the Gordian knot of neuroses that weighs on my chest like mooring chains. So I’m gonna do this ad hoc, post when I want, about what I want, when I have the bandwidth to spare. It will always be minimum 1k words (Don’t want the blog title to be a lie) but it probably won’t be every day.

I sort of regret that number because it’s a nice, round, good sounding number. A solid, red blooded, salt of the earth unit of measurement. People told me that it’s an impressive amount to write every day, and they’re right! It’s a lot of writing and it occasionally sucked! I genuinely had no idea what I was getting into. One thousand words is a lot of words. One thousand words is a lot of words in a day. One thousand words is a lot of words every day. I’m not an author. Maybe an author would see that as light work as they pool those words into one cohesive vision. But I had 42 days of madness. Sketches and journals and a lot of cyberpunk, no one thing following up directly on what preceded it. Fifty three thousand words (And again, why do I get mad at myself for not hitting a goal that I had already surpassed just by writing more than 1k words most days? I’m 11k words above where I should be!) are impressive for one narrative, and if I put my mind to it I could probably write that again with a clearer vision.

I’ve said before that this little experiment was a lot about me shaking off the self doubt and anxiety that’s kept me from being creative. I could/can never write a whole book, or even a novella. I don’t have tens of thousands of words in me! I can’t write consistently enough for those disparate threads to coalesce into something! Better not write at all.

But whoopsies, I wrote over fifty thousand words! That’s within striking distance of a YA book, word wise. And I did it in a really crazy way, just writing words and getting this tired old machine to churn out a few more sentences, but it’s wild seeing a concerted effort pay off. If I can write that many words in a mad dash to the finish line, how many could I write if I actually plotted and planned, and wasn’t always nervous of the sword of Damocles and how slender that thread is. Some people take YEARS to write a book, and word wise I’m halfway there in a month and a half.

It’s just a boost to my confidence I haven’t had in a long time creatively (Thanks global pandemic!), but don’t want to draw blood from a stone over it. Maybe I’ll start writing more of what I want rather than what I feel obligated to to hit that thousand word milestone. Maybe I’ll start linking pieces together, or heaven help us, editing them! There’s a lot of things I still want to write about or say, and this is my avenue to do that!

So maybe I’ll do this forever. Maybe this will be my last post. Who knows! I’m just here to have fun.