100

I know I've been writing a lot of real talk posts lately, and I know that this is a really self servicing thing to write about, but it has to be said. This is the one hundredth post I've made on this blog. And I've only missed one day, which is honestly better than I had hoped going into this. And somehow, despite not wanting to, despite not knowing what to write a vast majority of the time, I'm still going. And that's pretty amazing.

I can't remember the last time I ever did anything for one hundred days straight. I can't remember the last time I did anything for fifty days straight, quite honestly. I've never been particularly good to sticking to something. Especially not something that I would consider to actually be good for me. I get tired of things, or I forget to do them, or any number of things, and I let myself fall off of a path that I am attempting to put myself on.

Despite being something that I have always known I wanted to do, writing has never been a thing I can do consistently. That's part of the reason I didn't make the goal to write fiction every single day. Ideally I would be, but I think it's pretty obvious at this point that I would not be able to pull that off. I would run out of ideas fast, and I would run out of motivation to keep moving. There's a good chance that if you see me writing real talk, then it's because I simply couldn't think of anything fictional to write about. That's not always true, but there's a good chance of it.

If you've never heard of it, I try to always participate in something called National Novel Writing Month. I could go on and explain it, but suffice to say that it is simply setting yourself a goal to write fifty thousand words in thirty days. And I've done that. I've managed to accomplish that twice, which is no mere feat. But even in that, neither time did I do it in thirty days straight. I lost some days, and on my second go, I finished long before I ever hit that thirty day marker.

In these one hundred days I have been writing, I have hit that fifty thousand word marker once again. It wasn't on one continuous topic this time, which is weird for me. I'm used to, in my writing, picking a story and rolling with it for as long as I can, and then not writing again for god only knows how long. But I didn't do that this time. I wrote until a topic was done, and then I picked up another topic and I wrote again. And I did that over and over and over. And I'm going to keep doing that over and over and over. Because I'm trying to teach myself not to stop just because I lose track of where I was going.

I've learned some stuff about my writing in doing this. I've seen some of the things that I do wrong, and I've seen some of the stuff that I do right, and I've started to figure out how to go about bettering what I do. But I still have a long way to go.

I hope that, when I hit a year, that I don't stop. I hope to keep this blog going for as long as I possibly can, because there will always be more for me to learn, more to say. As a good man once told me, this blog should be my playground, where I can experiment and strive to do new and different things. But I also hope to eventually figure out how to balance this with writing privately, making full and long stories that I always dreamed of being able to write. I have tried to do that, but it's harder than you might think. But I'm gonna keep trying, and hopefully eventually figure out how to go about it.

Maybe in my next hundred days, I'll be able to tell you about it.