CogBlogged Tagged ‘writing’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by RaGardner4 It was overly grand ambition (or stupid ass planning) that got me thinking I could do NaNoWriMo again this year. I’m bailing. And of course I do not need to apologize (especially as most likely no one will even notice). I’ve already got enough on the plate every day, with training for a half marathon, doing my photography dailyshoot and daily 365/2010 photos, where the heck was 1667 words per day gonna come from? Well, I could do it, but at this point I feel like I’d be just spraying words for the sake of it. While I had a few good writing spurts. my story of a dog’s eyed view of humanity was just not feeling like much of anything. I did reach my goal to tinker with WordPress and to try out Patrick’s nifty riff on Anthologize (I was publishing ePub [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ex_magician Wow, does anyone remember 43 Things? It was one of the early social networking apps, and to me, still a nifty idea. You list 43 things you want to do, it connects you with other people who have the same goal or have completed it. You can post your success or ask questions of people with the same goal. I’d not been there is well over 2 years, but I did remember tossing out the goal “Write a Novel”. It was not “publish a novel” or “work as an author”, it was just write one. I had no idea where to start so I didn’t because I told myself I could not do it. That was the same thinking I had about running, but by committing to a goal where there is a deadline (like run a marathon on a given date), and [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Fenchurch! November was a month of taking on more of the “do something every day” type projects, and I think the madness needs to stop. I’ll stop every day. This of course, is not a promise I intend to keep. I find these challenges very rewarding, especially the ones that you convince yourself that you can’t do before you try. How common is it we defeat our efforts from the start? For a recap… 2009/365 Photos I’m in the second year of the informal group that spring up over the idea of trying to take photographs every day, and posting our best to flickr, sharing in the 365 Photos pool. This is one of many things I file under the strategy of Do What D’Arcy Does. In 2007, this idea was a solo project of D’Arcy Norman; I chimed in 2008, and we started [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Darren Larson I’m feeling many parallels between my current training to run a half marathon and trying to crank out 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo. Obviously a regimen is needed, the goals are both things I question (or have questioned) whether I can do, falling behind the schedule– puts you behind the schedule, sometimes in a spiral of self-criticism. I’m not saying I Hate Writing, but it is damn hard, especially when there is little time to be un-inpsired. Just when you think you’ve done a good run, the damn clock on a treadmill or the NaNoWriMo chart, sets you in a head down grunt up hill. I am not climbing the right hill! Tomorrow is mid-way in the month, and to be on pace, I should be at 25,000 words, and thus am about 7000 behind. It’s easy to get obsessed with the count, [...]