Last year in late December, a friend on instructables got a bunch of us involved in a project to post a picture a day for the month of January. I thought this would be fun, so I signed up and started carrying my camera in my pocket so it would be at the ready at all times. It was fun, and it let me work on my photography skills. I made sure to take at least one picture each day, and at least for January I updated each day as well.
As February approached, I started to think of the future. By that point I had signed up over at 365project, and I’d started thinking about continuing for the full year. Could I do it? Did I have the strength of mind and force of will to make myself do a thing a day for a full year? I decided it would at least be worth trying!
I continued the project for all of 2011, and I made it! I had to scale back a bit, to only updating the project site once every week or two—or even longer around Halloween—but I still took a picture every single day for 365 days. I fudged things a bit once or twice, counting a picture that I’d taken after midnight as the previous day (I was still awake from the previous day, wasn’t I?) or going the other way and considering those 1 AM shots as the calendar day they were taken on, but I did it!
Early on, I got the idea that if I could prove to myself that I could buckle down and do a simple thing every day, maybe I could push that envelope and do something more complex. I’d been listening to the Dunesteef podcast, and the hosts had talked about writing 750 words a day. They said that was about one printed page, so if you did that every day for a year, that would be a 365 page novel. I thought, maybe I could do that?
I thought about it and thought about it, and eventually scaled it back a bit, but decided I could make it. I’ve changed it to just 250 words (more than 90,000 words in one year), and decided I’d let myself pay it forward or catch up as need be, as I’m sure there will be times this summer when I won’t be around a computer.
So I’m in! I’m going to do this! I don’t think I’m a very good writer, but maybe by January 1, 2012 (assuming the 2012 wackjobs are wrong, of course) I will be. I’ll probably mostly be writing these journal entries and short stories, but according to the SFWA, that’s more than two novels worth of words!
And now, the real question: who’s with me?
If you’d like to join in on Ian Fagan’s Crazy Ass Year of Writing 250 Words Every Fucking Day (or IFCAYoW250WEFD, for short), here are the rules:
- You must average 250 words written per day, every day, for all 366 days of 2012 (91500 words).
- If you write more than 250 words, they can count towards the next day, or make up for previous days.
- The offset cannot be greater than 2 weeks—for example, if I wrote 3,500 words in a day (yeah, right), it would count for that day and the next 13 days if I need it to, but if I wrote 4,000 words in a day (ha!) it could still only be counted for the next 13 days, or make up for 13 previous days of not writing.
- Journal entries must be published within one week to a blog or facebook page or something, and linked to for others to see.
- Stories do not have to be published to a blog or whatever (unless you want to), but they must be submitted for publication to an honest to goodness publishing house, magazine, paying podcast, or paying market of some sort within one month of writing the last sentence of the first draft. This is of course going to be on the honor system, but if you join my crazy scheme I expect you to be honest.
- If enough people are actually interested, I’ll make a facebook page and a forum for us to blah blah blah at each other in, and keep track of each others’ exploits.
Okay, there it is! Let the writing commence! Including this very sentence, I’m already up to 754 words!
