Writing Challenge day 1 - The Beginning

I have a problem. I love movies, TV shows, book, video games, board games, my wife, my kids, my dogs, trains, the rain, and taking it easy. My problem is that i haven't been able to turn that love into any outlet that helps me work through my daily life.

Last year I started painting water colors and that outlet was amazing, unfortunately a few weeks in my wife and I decided that we were going to try and move from our home to a place that wasn't over an hour away from both of our works. That amount of time investment that it took to make that work and eventually move put a huge strain on our relationship and ourselves. I stopped painting and the task of getting back into it was so daunting in my head that i have only picked it back up once and I was so upset with how bad it was that I decided it was just better to leave it alone.

I want to have a creative job. I spent many of hopeless days filling out resumes and soliciting creative companies to try and get in somewhere even the ground floor, but i hadn't done anything to show that I was infact a creative person. Now I have a family to support I dont have the ability to take a huge paycut to do low end grunt work to get the experience that would be needed.

I have started other hobby ventures, like this Blog and my company “Smith Creative Industries” but with no one else to work with its hard to keep self motivated and get done everything that I think needs to be done to make it successful, at least to me.

So here I am. I have a great family, a good job, and a circle of friends but I am unhappy. Im not sure how to get out of this funk and that has been the worst part about it, to know something to be absolutely true but to be able to do nothing about it, and to be afraid to reach out and ask anyone for help. So what does one do?

Many times in my head I have created something and then, also in my head, I spend the next few weeks deconstructing and rebuilding it till it becomes a huge empire, imagine wanting to build your own model boat,except at the end of the exercise your heights have been set to building a cruise liner, entertaining thousands and employing hundreds. The task becomes so daunting that you fall apart and brood about it for the next 2 months because you had this great nugget of an idea, let it get away from you and now you can figure out how to get back to the simple idea that you could make work and that it might make you happy and give you an outlet for your creativity.

So that was my challenge and I think I have found a way to keep it small and to give myself an outlet for my creative that I may be able to use in the future to combine my passions and my work.

The idea

365 days of writing

Each day spend at least 15 minutes writing one page (single spaced) stories or posts

The end goal would be as follows

Writing something to post everyday, that something has to be at least 1 page long

To eventually write a million words

According to my calculator, I would have to write 2,740 words a day to make that happen in a year. To give you some idea what I have written so far is 622 words. If I stick to ~1000 words a day that would mean 3 years of work to hit 1 million words. I think that is very doable and a great goal with easy short term milestones.

So my mindset is thus: Write everyday at least one page, try to make it 1,000 words but as long as you hit 1 page and write for at least 15 minutes that's ok. As I continue this exercise I will start adding additional achievements for myself that I can set up rewards for.

Challenges:

1. I am great at writing stories but im terrible at editing myself. This will need to be a long term goal if I want this writing to turn into anything at all BUT because i know that this is a major challenge for me, I will do basic editing but I will not edit each 1-page till i am comfortable, as it would be a cause for me to stop and the main goal is to not stop.
2. Its very easy to start a project like this and then let it go after a few weeks. I believe this is just human nature but it also separates those who can and those who can’t. I want to be someone who does things and not just someone who dreams of them.
3. As mentioned previously can be too easily caught up in the long term and planning stages because planning and organization have also been a strong characteristic of mine. I need to make sure to stay focused on day-to-day work

So dear readers everyday you can expect something to read. Most likely it will be a story I wrote from the story depository that I keep for myself, but whats going on in my life and getting my thoughts out will also be part of this challenge. I also want to start painting again so its highly possible that my terrible paintings will be posted as well.

Thats about all I have for today, which is a lot more than I thought I would have. As of the last period I was sitting at 964 words and that in itself is pretty awesome, but I want to keep writing just to hit that 1,000 word milestone. This post has taken ~22 minutes to write which is right in the butter zone.

Word count:1013