I write all the time, I’ve been writing in a journal since 2001. I started hand writing in nice leather bound journals in the beginning, nothing earth shattering, just a lot of what I was doing at the time, and in the early days, areas I was trying to improve. In 2004 I started using a computer based journal, it’s the same one I use today, it’s called iDiary and it a Windows desktop app and not cloud based. I’ve played around with a few cloud based journals like Penzu, but I like the speed and simplicity of iDiary.
I love to write, I love to tell stories and even more than attempting to write stories, I love a good story. This year I’m going to explore story telling from the perspective of trying to write creative stories. Like most people who like to write just for fun, I have 1,000 ideas and 0 well thought out and written stories. That ends in 2019, “he says with a chuckle”, this year I’m throwing that big Thor Hammer thing, Stormbreaker I think? Through the heart of my ideas that have never seen the light of day.
I’m going to make a commitment to write at least 100 words per day and publish those words, every day in 2019. I’m a big fan of Seth Godin, he talks about shipping your work, his concept goes much deeper than I will go here, I’m using Seth’s concept of “Ship It”, to get my writing off the internal journal pages and on to my blog. No one reads my blog, I’ll be safe in the beginning, the more I write and work on the craft of storytelling, and good writing structure, the more I’ll find the confidence to publish on additional formats, and after 365 published writings I hope I’ll feel pretty good about being a writer.
Jon Acuff also wrote a book called Finish and I’m halfway through his book. Part of what I’m getting out of Finish are strategies to get past the beast of perfection. I suffer from chronic perfectionism, more on that in later writings, in the meantime, Jon this first writing, which by the way I’m writing at 9:00 PM on Tuesday January 1, 2019, will go through a very quick edit before I post it live on my blog. It’s possible I could swing that pendulum from perfection all the way to terrible writer, on day one, but I will take terrible writer with a published piece of writing, over a better piece of writing that remains unpublished while I miss my Day 1 Deadline “perfecting it!”
By the way, how many words is that? Cheers to 2019 and to you and your goals. When someone reads this in a couple years after I’ve become at the very least a “readable” author, I hope it makes you feel good. If this guy started with this…
Be Good!
- Chris