My 500 Words challenge

Ralf und Thomas have just
 completed their 500 today.
A.Stemmer has proof.

Jeff Goins has challenged me (and thousands of other writers) to participate in the My 500 Words challenge.

We writers do this sort of thing all the time. It's good motivation, add a social aspect to what is sometimes a rather lonely career and we Get Stuff Done.  (These books don't write themselves, you know.)

Essentially, we must write a minimum of 500 words a day, every day, for the month of January.  The goal is not to generate as much as we can (a la NaNoWriMo), but to establish the habit of writing every day.  After all, if we are professional writers, we need to be writing every day.

I write 5-6 days average out of the week.  That said, over the past three weeks, I've written a total of 4 days. (Curse you, Holiday Season!  I've got better things to do than celebrate.)  I had fallen out of the habit of writing.

As I loves me my resolutions, I buckled down on New Year's Day and cranked out some fiction. Did the same thing the next day.  Yesterday I rassled with a mild stomach bug (Curse you, Australia, for not having Pepto Bismol!) but got my 500 done.  Today, we'll see.  It's not too busy a Saturday.  I've got chiro and some yardwork and puh-lenty of time to write... as long as I sit down. Butt-in-chair and Just Do It.

A friend once told me the hardest thing about playing the clarinet is picking up the darn thing.  Writing, same thing.  Casual writers have the luxury of writing when they feel like it and not writing when they don't.  Many apprentices, same thing.  But if you expect to move from apprenticeship to journeyhood, you've got to get going on cranking out your half-million words.

500 will get you there.  I don't mean that if you write 500 words a day you'll hit the half-mil sooner rather than later.  (It'll take a very long time to get that far--a thousand days.)  But getting in the habit of writing 500 will get you to the point of, "Hey, this is easy. I do it every day.  I'll bet I can write a thousand.  Or two thousand (like I did on Wednesday).  

Those are the sorts of totals that quickly add up.

So yeah.  I'll post regular-ish updates here, or on Facebook regarding my progress.  Be warned; I'm sporadic when it comes to being online.
________________________
In the spirit of whimsy, Her Grace peppered this blog entry with random yet topical links.