For Once In My Life

I did it, y'all.

I often have big dreams, but not very often do I actually live up to them. Since I was very young, I wanted to be a storyteller. I tried a few different ways of doing so--feature films, comic books, documentaries--before finally deciding that novel and short story writing was the way I wanted to do it. 

 Once that was decided, I proceeded to do a whole lot of nothing in pursuit of that goal. Well, that wasn't completely true, I would write a short story or two a year, honing my craft about as quickly as a stream eats its way through a rock. If I lived a million years, I might have managed to become a real writer at that rate.

Here and there I tried to muster some perseverance and work more diligently on the goal of writing, but I always petered out in the end, letting the pressures of life sidetrack me until the next thing I knew it had been months since the last time I'd written a word.

When I turned 40 back in October of 2014, I made the goal of becoming a writer in five years. I even made it the focus of my solo podcast, the Anklecast. Of course I didn't make it, or even really put in all that much effort toward the goal.

This year, I decided that wasn't going to happen. I turned 45 years old in October of 2019, and I made the goal to write 300,000 words over the course of the next year. That seemed pretty doable as long as I stuck with it, and for once in my life I actually did stick to it. 

I made the goal to write 1,000 words a day, and for most of the last eight months, I've managed to do so. Sticking to that goal made the larger goal pretty simple, because there's 365 days in a year. I only have to write 1,000 for 300 of those days to make it to the finish line.

I started out really slow in November and December, keeping my goal at a low 500 words a day, and forgetting to write on many of those days, but I didn't give up. In January, I upped my goal to 1,000 a day, and I guess the rest is history. Siri tells me it's been 307 days since my birthday, and despite many of those days being well below 1,000, enough of them were above 1,000 to make up for it, and this month I crossed the line over 300,000 words.

During that time, I finished two novels, one of them clocking in at 100,738 words, the other hitting 120,485 words. I also wrote eleven short stories of varying lengths in that time as well. The year isn't even over yet, either. September is just beginning, which means I have nearly two more months before I turn 46.

I must admit that this year has been a success, and I am determined to build on that. I'm starting to work out my goals for next year, which will involve a lot of publishing of the words that I wrote this year, as well as the ones that I have written in years past.