I fell off the wagon, at least as far as 40 Days of Writing is concerned. It ended officially on April 9th, at which point I hadn’t written anything for about four days, much less published anything. The same thing happened to a couple other folks. Jodee moved. Michael moved in with Jodee. I lack such worthy excuses. I got lazy. And when the posts I was working on, struggling with, didn’t work out, I let that frustration shut me down, and I gave up.
I still think I did pretty good. I’d say I wrote daily for 3/4 of the time and published 2/3 of the time. If I were a baseball player, I’d be in the hall of fame after my rookie year with numbers like that. (Part of why I love baseball. It’s the only time where a 30% success rate makes you MVP. My math teachers never really saw the wisdom in that, sadly.) I’m hard on myself, of course. I wanted to do it every day. I feel like I failed, a little, which is ridiculous. But I’ve always been my worst critic. I’m freakishly competitive, which is odd since I am hardly ever driven enough to do the work or practice enough to actually be competitive. Yet when I fail, whether it was a Chemistry test in high school or an informal last-man-standing round of naming grape varietals, I beat myself up about it.
Failure or this, this has been a great experiment though. I’ve missed writing, as I’ve said many times before. And I think I learned something: I miss writing fiction a lot. Yes, I used to journal, but I never wanted this blog to turn into that. So I think for the next 40 Days of Writing, whenever that is, I might shoot for writing micro fiction (or longer). I can still write about my day, but maybe if I frame it as fiction, it won’t run the risk of becoming repetitive and whiney. And who knows? I might learn a thing or two about myself by trying to take a step or two back from whatever it is I’m worrying about that particular day.
In the meantime, baseball season has started. It’s gorgeous springtime up here. I somehow managed to bring lunch two days in a row, and I got up early enough to run yesterday, and I had breakfast two days in a row. I’ve only had one cup of coffee in the last five days (and it was half-caf), and I’m supposed to go running with my friend Dan tomorrow morning. I’m feeling refreshed and a little less down about things.
Oh and this happened the other day. Life could be a lot worse, I guess.
You can’t see it here, but it was actually a TRIPLE.
Alex 