Just over six weeks to go and a promise I made at the start of the year will be over. I will have written for 365 days. I am getting excited, I am getting to that point where I want to rush for goal but that suggests that I won’t continue. That I have put the exercise over my craft and practice rather than use it as a tool to affirm it. What do I mean by that? The simplest way to put it is that this has not been an exercise about form but of function. The act of writing. I have written every day and it has made me a better person. It has improved my writing and is now paying dividends in publication. That is the function. To produce work rather than talk about the production of work. To get on with it.
I have gotten ahead in my writing and keeping a record of writing here and there by making sure that I was always a day ahead of what I was posting. That means when this exercise comes to an end I will have done 366 days of writing. Combine that with #100daysofwriting which I did in 2018 and I will have done 466 days, that’s a mammoth investment of time. I have averaged around 90 minutes a day in my writing. That’s 699 hours of writing. You may think that isn’t a lot but you can produce a vast array of work in that time. I have produced 11 short stories, one essay, six magazine articles and started a PhD. All around a job. You get ahead by doing the work and writing. By staying ahead of social media so that you are not drawn into procrastination because even you don’t know where you are going to be by the end of the process. I have time to go. Another six weeks and the potential to make those 11 short stories, 12. Next time you say you have no time to write, consider what you could have done in 699 hours over 466 days. You’d be amazed what you could achieve. I went into this at my lowest point as a writer, thinking I was a sham, I leave knowing that I can write, I do get published and I am read. All it took was 699 hours.
Andrew Oldham's Boneyard 