A hundred days

Wow... I'm still kind of shell shocked.  I just finished my very last entry on 750 Words, marking the final day in an unbroken chain of a hundred days, and the final word in immense sea of a hundred thousand words.  Just... well, wow.  My entry today was a goodbye letter of sorts to the site and a reflection on my experience, so maybe I'll just quote a bit of that instead of writing a whole new blog post now.

...This was an amazing experience, and it gave a lot to me.  But now this chapter is over, and it is time for the next page to begin.

You've helped me so much, seven hundred and fifty words.  You got me writing again.  I think my typing is so much better now -- not that it was too shabby before, but I can write seven hundred and fifty words faster now than I could ever have dreamed on day one.  You can tell by how long it took me to get the cheetah badge; before that I had not grown enough.  Every day I was stretched a little bit farther than I was the day before, and now see how far I can reach.

And the choices you've helped me make.  Just writing out my thoughts... helping me put them in order... you made me find the time for that, and it has been invaluable.  Just recently I came into my entry with a jumbled mind and no idea which was the path for me, but by the time I was finished, my knotted thoughts had been put to the page and I could see clearly [...] what I really wanted.  I think, even after I'm long done this challenge, whenever I have a problem I can't fathom out, here is where I'll come to solve it... And when I'm finished, after my thoughts have all been lined up straight and my nerves collected, I'll know what I should do.  And when the new page loads and I see the stats for the day, I'll see the little black icon telling me I have a streak of one.  And down below I'll see I once wrote for a hundred days, and that I once wrote a hundred thousand words, and I will smile, and remember all this time that was and that maybe someday will be again.  I enjoyed this.  I enjoyed it very much.  I feel like I can write so much more; that I can think so much more.  That I can sort out my thoughts; that writing is my sanctuary again.  Or maybe for the first time.  I thought when I began this exercise that I was refinding something I had lost, but maybe that is not true.  I've written more in these past hundred days than I likely ever had before in my life, even in the days where I was newly enamored with words and writing and all its wonders.  No, this was something new.  I was creating a new spark inside myself; setting my feet and fingers down a path untraveled.

...The last page.  I still can't believe it.  A hundred days, a hundred thousand words.  It's just incredible.  Extraordinary.  And I've been going on for so long about an adventure, a journey, an odyssey, but maybe this was my adventure all along.

It wasn't across the Earth.  It was always here, dimensionless, on this simple page of black and white.  But it was a journey through time, from 2012 to here.  A hundred days it took for me to complete it, and have I come full circle, or in a straight line?  Am I far from where I began, a stranger in a brave new world, or has my wanderlust been satiated, and I'm back home, safe in my hobbit hole?

I'm not a big believer of the cyclic school of historical thought, so I hope that it is the former.  I am a different girl than I was a hundred days ago, and a hundred days from now I will be a different girl than I am today.  That's how time works; it's one long and twisting journey, one that never stops until your final day...

Yeah, I know that got pretty hammy.  And I ramble on like that for over three thousand words.  But honestly, I was getting pretty emotional over this; I've been on 750 Words every single day since January 30th, so I guess it just kind of feels like the end of something important.  I'm really glad that I did this activity; there were days that it was my saving grace and days that I felt it was the worst thing in the world, but all in all, it was an amazing experience that helped me improve my writing and typing, engage my creative side, and reflect on all the things that would otherwise just be left jumbled up in my mind.  It's well worth a little bit of ham.

Setting the parameters

Today I reached a streak of 48 days writing on 750 Words, and I have got to say, this second month is much, much harder than the first.  I'm finding it really hard to keep motivated, in part because of my busy schedule, but also because it's quite difficult to keep something going without an end in mind.  My first month was manageable:  I had the tangible goal of writing every day for a month, and along the way I was accomplishing the smaller goals that were rewarded with badges, such as writing for three, five, ten, and thirty days.  Now, however, I've lost those manageable little slices.  The next streak badge is not until I reach one hundred days, and the challenge of writing every day for a month sort of loses its novelty when you already did it the month before.  That's why I think that the reason for my struggle this month is because I lack direction -- I haven't really stated where I'm going with this activity or where my endpoint is -- and I therefore believe that if I decide on that, it will help me be more motivated in reaching that goal.  I need to set the parameters, if you will.

So, what's my plan?  My goal for this activity -- the end product that I'm working towards -- is to write every day for one hundred days, and, while doing this, write a total of a hundred thousand words (so a thousand words, on average, a day).  If when the beginning of April rolls around I end up deciding that I want to renew my deadline and set a new goal, that's fine, but for now, my aim is to keep this up for a hundred days, and continue to improve my writing skills and creativity in the process.  I might be in a bit of a rough patch motivation-wise, but the quality of my writing lately has been higher than usual (which I suppose might explain why I'm beginning to feel a bit inspirationally worn out).  I've been writing a lot of fiction:  a multiple-entry spanning story about a girl coping with the end of the world; the tale of a skier who dies on the mountains; a chronicle of the future told from the perspective of an island, just to name a few.  I've been writing more short stories than I have in years, and it's making me remember why, when I was younger, all I ever wanted to be was a writer.  I have different aspirations now, but I'm really glad that I have this opportunity to get back into fiction writing, because no matter how long I forget about it or for how many years I neglect it, it will always be something I love to do.

Albatross, hamster, and a turquoise horse

Wow.  I cannot believe that I have been writing on 750words every day for the past 34 days.  I have yet to break my streak, and I think that in itself is kind of exceptional.  Doing something every single day is difficult; it's not always easy to put away a twenty-minute or so chunk of time.  Like today, for instance.  I woke up early, went to the university to work on a project, went to work, and I just got home and was supposed to leave again for a party.  But you learn to make time in your daily routine; like now, when I managed to squeeze in my writing between all my other activities.  It is hard to really understand the magnitude of committing to do something everyday until you actually begin, but I don't regret starting this project at all.

Forcing myself to make time for writing has done so many good things for me.  It helps collect my thoughts; it has gotten me into creative writing again; it forces me to reflect on what is going on around me.  Sometimes I spend my entry just whining and complaining.  During the week before exams I used it to help get myself organized with regards to my studying -- I had no idea what I was going to do in what order and was feeling overwhelmed, but by the time my 750 words had been written I felt more relaxed and with a plan in mind.  For the past few days I've written short stories:  today it was about a teenage criminal living in West Vancouver in the year 2028; yesterday it was a tale based on a character from an episode of a television show I had watched; a few days before that it was a psychological thriller about a wall, of all things.  Sometimes I talk about deep stuff like religion or my plans for the future, and sometimes I just ramble on about Jessica's facial expressions while watching Supernatural or talk about today from the perspective of my cat.  I love how individual and diverse this activity is, and I love how it is unlike anything else I have done so far for CAS.  Everything else has been so group oriented:  working to a deadline for newspaper, working as a team for ringette or dodgeball or GISHWHES, organizing a committee for yearbook.  750 Words is just me and my thoughts and the direction my mind takes itself, and forcing myself to make time for this is really helping me in exploring my own motivations.

You may have noticed in the picture up top that I've gotten a few new badges as of late.  The albatross was for writing every day for thirty days, and the turquoise horse was for completing the monthly challenge.  When January began I couldn't really imagine writing every single day; at some point I would be busy or forget and slip up, but thirty one days later I still had not.  Looking at a month from the beginning seems like such a long time -- looking towards the end of February right now seems so far away -- but when you just take it a day at a time, you've reached the end before you even had a chance to blink.  All in all, I'm pretty proud of myself for being able to stick to my commitment and complete the January challenge; on average it takes me twenty minutes to write an entry, so that means that I dedicated over ten hours of my January to writing, and I think that is just incredible.  I've signed up for the February challenge, and while typing this here on February 1st I can't imagine reflecting on these words twenty eight days later in either victory or self-disappointment, at some point I will, and I definitely will try my best to make it the former.  The other of my new badges is the hamster, another of which I'm immensely proud.  It rewards the practice of going ten days without a single distraction, and I've been working really hard to type all my entries in one sitting to force myself to keep my thread of consciousness going.  Sometimes it is hard to push through it, but when I log into my 750 Words account and start my entry for the day, I refuse to take a break until it is finished, and I think managing to push through the fog of writer's block is another accomplishment in and of itself.

Suffice to say my 750 Words adventure is going well as I close the chapter of its first month, and I hope that I can keep this streak going for many more days to come.

New year, more CAS

I've been ringing in the new year with a brand-spanking-new CAS activity, and I really think this one is going to be a great personal challenge:  it's called 750 Words.  I read about it -- as I seem to do with everything -- online.  It's an initiative to write 750 words on any topic, once a day, every day, and it comes in the form of 750words.com.  It keeps track of your postings -- you can go back and read any of your previous entries, although they are completely private from the rest of the world -- and it even tells you some pretty neat statistics, both about any given entry, and about all your entries in general.  For example, each day it will analyze your word choice and tell you what were your biggest emotions and concerns were in the text, such as upset, death, relationships, affectionate, money, and so on.  It also tells you the mindset the entry was written in based on four spectra:  introvert/extrovert, positive/negative, certain/uncertain, and thinking/feeling.  It tells you if you primarily wrote about the past/present/future, about sight/touch/hearing, about I/us/you/them; it even lists the words you used most frequently in the entry.

This is my chart from today, showing the words per minute I typed at throughout the entry.  The green dot represents the moment when I reached the daily goal of 750 words, and the green line represents the number of words in the entry at any given point in time.

As you can tell from the above photograph, you get badges added to your page to keep track of your streak.  I am entered in the monthly challenge for January, so I am attempting to keep that streak going throughout the entire month, and then continue it into February.

So, what do I hope to gain from all of this?  I always have loved writing, but I never seem to have the time or occasion to do much of it.  750 words is a really carefully thought out amount; it's not so long as to be like a novel, but it is not something you can just whip off in a few minutes on whatever topic.  You need to make a conscious effort to sit down, set aside twenty to thirty minutes, find a prompt, and just write continuously, and it is so very different from any other writing experience.  In the school newspaper, you're writing to convey information; same with school assignments.  This type of writing can be stories, reflections, journal entries, thoughts... I've actually been quite surprised with what I've written about so far.  Because of the length entailed and the stream-of-consciousness nature of continuous writing, it ends up going in directions I didn't expect, and I'm learning some things about myself and some opinions I hold that I never really noticed before.

I've found that writing every day is not easy.  Since it requires that conscious effort, it's not really something that can just become habit.  You've got to focus and push yourself to do it each day, but I really think this will improve my writing skills, and also help me understand myself and my motivations just a little bit better.

I focus quite a bit in my writing on the sensation of touch more so than sight or hearing; my writing contains a lot of "us" as opposed to "them" or "you" or "I".  I use 31% more conjunctions than the average person.

I can tell that 750 Words is going to be a very rich activity, and while it is definitely a commitment, it is one that I am prepared to make.