What is Milwordy? It’s craziness, it’s awesomeness, it’s a deadline, which as I am well aware is something that I need in order to do any good work. If you want a really good resource on why deadlines are good for me, there is a very good TED talk on procrastination which I show to my students at the beginning of the school year every year. You can find the link Here. In it Tim Urban writes about how there are basically three components to a proscrastinator’s life- and we are all procrastinators. He wrote a blog about it called “The Procrastination Matrix” in which he describes the reason that we need this deadline (Link). We all have a little monkey inside of us that wants us to to go crazy and do whatever. My procrastination monkey is prone to watching YouTube videos which are based on stupid reddit posts. Most of these posts highlight how awful people are, and I shouldn’t be watching them, but my procrastination monkey is absolutely *fascinated* with the idea that there are people out there who are awful, and she can judge them for being awful. One of her favorite Reddit forums is “Am I the Asshole” because 90% of the time, you can definitely say to the person who wrote the main post that yes, they are an asshole, and being able to call someone an asshole because they asked for it is very satisfying to her little monkey brain. She can do this for hours. But, if I have a deadline, the Panic Monster will kick her tiny monkey butt off of YouTube so fast that her monkey brain has no time to protest. So, I need a deadline. Deadlines are very important to me. I wouldn’t get half of my grading done without the deadline of report cards out there, so I need that deadline.
Milwordy is hopefully going to give me that type of deadline that I need for writing. I have spent the last year of my life deep in a Creative Writing Program full of deadlines. I have written essays, short stories, papers on books, book reviews, poems and even a full one-act play because I had a deadline to follow. I earned my Master’s degree, but I found myself for nearly a whole month completely deadlineless. I had nothing to motivate me to write, other than 4thewords. (More on that later). Milwordy hopefully will fill the void that my Masters Program has left behind. It will give me deadlines, and is easily divided into parts, as any good goal is.
I first heard about Milwordy over on the That Writing Place Discord server. I used to spend a lot of time there, but I fell out of it for a while, but now that I am quarantined like the rest of everybody, I want to get back into some kind of community, and Discord writing and reading channels are helping me with that as is the KittenAcademy Discord. I hadn’t realized how much I needed a community to sort of cling to and how much I missed people. I often will bill myself as something of an introvert. I feel like I’m awkward and uncomfortable in groups I often will find that I have a great deal of imposter syndrome. Even if I fit in with a group and I feel like I’m getting along well with them, there is a paranoid little voice somewhere in the back of my head that is telling me that I’m not worthy of their friendship. So, being on Discord at least takes away the physical awkwardness, and I can hang out and talk about books and writing, which are my two favorite things to talk about.
So, there I was on That Writing Place, just chatting up, talking about writing and Nanowrimo and writing goals, and someone said “come and join us by writing a million words in a year.” I admit, it sounded scary, but then I did the math. That million words a year comes out to be about 3000 words a day. I can do that. Admittedly, I may have to move stuff around, but I already write at least a thousand words a day just on my morning journal which I use as a meditative practice. It comes from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which I may talk about in another post. So, every morning, I sit down for at least a half an hour (usually 5:30-6am) and write and write and just let my thoughts gush out of me. I used to do this longhand in a paper Leuchtturm journal, but I write fast when I type. Also, if I type words into a computer, I can put them in 4thewords and beat the challenges there, and increase my streak. So, that also helped to motivate me, since I love playing games and gamifying anything, especially writing, is helpful to me.
Now, my husband, who is wonderful and always has my best interests at heart, reminds me that I should definitely monitor myself and make sure that I’m doing this for the right reasons and not to be obsessive. I tend to get obsessive and that is not a good thing. So, I am going to take this challenge casually and not get horribly upset and think that I am a horrible person if I don’t make it to 3000 words a day or even if I’m hugely far behind at the end of a month because really it’s small challenges just to get me writing that I need. I don’t need to write a million words.
However... I want to write a million words, and that million words doesn’t have to be just fiction or a novel or some big project like Nanowrimo tends to be. Nanowrimo is 50,000 words, preferably on one novel in the month of November. Milwordy... everything counts. And everything means journal topics, blog posts (like this one) emails, editing, drafts, note taking, research. Everything that I do in the act of being a creative person and a writer counts towards the million words, and that is something that I can deal with.
So, I guess challenge accepted. I’m going to do this. I don’t know if I’ll succeed or not, but I plan at least writing as much as I can in a day and thinking about all of the things that I do to communicate in my world.
Of course, now I have to figure out how to use my blogging software again, or find a good markup editor that I can use that will work with Blogger. That sounds like some research.... yay! Or.. leave Blogger and transfer everything over to a WordPress or another blogging site... or take over my husbands...
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