Drawn to darkness
Toeing the line
I put in all my word numbers for now and it says that I have written approximately 43000 words so far for milwordy. That’s a pretty good number for me, considering that I sometimes struggle to do 50,000 in one month when I’m doing Nanowrimo. I’m not entirely on pace to be doing the whole shebang right now, but I am getting words.
So, three weeks in, what has milwordy done for me so far?
I think I’ve developed this habit of writing at least twice a day now. I have usually been up in the morning doing Morning Pages for the Artist’s Way or reading or just sort of toddling about. I get up much earlier than my husband does, even in the summer when I don’t have classes, and I cherish that morning time, that time when I can just do whatever I want, as long as I don’t have to go in the bedroom. We have a very small apartment, so when I am in the office, the bedroom is right next door, and the living room is right behind me. 700 square feet is tight quarters for two people, even in a two bedroom apartment, but I like my husband and he’s a writer, so he understands if I am sitting in front of a keyboard with my fingers flying and my noise canceling ear phones on that I am writing.
The stuff that I write in the morning is often stuff that is inconsequential. My thoughts on the previous day, just getting words on the page. I call it my mental vomit. I get all the stuff in me up and out on to the page. Of course that metaphor goes away when I start to think about that I go over what I have put on the page and I think about what I want to keep and what is important to me, and what I can use, but often it is just crap, just some sort of mental garbage that I need to get out of me so that I can go on with my day and be a regular human being, whatever that is. Morning writing is where I can get the things that are bothering me out of me so that I don’t have to think about them. I put them on the page, and they can stay there, and I don’t have to think about them. That is what is most important. I can leave these thoughts there and come back to them, but more often than not, they stay there on the page. I will copy and paste these thoughts into my DayOne App, which is a great journaling app that just sort of keeps everything in one place and I can add tags and pictures and things, but more often than not, I just copy, paste and forget.
My evening writing is a little bit different. I spend time with it usually. I will write about writing; I will write about books that I am reading. The most important thing that I do in the evening is write for other people. While the morning writing is just word vomit to get thoughts out of my head, the evening writing is things that someday someone will read - hopefully. I write my blog posts in the evening, I will work on my novels in the evenings, and sometimes I’ll write a poem or two. The evening writing is for an audience, and it gives my day a settled feeling, like I’m actually accomplishing something, that I have done some good in the world.
Milwordy has begun to help with that. It motivates me to put the words on the page. I may be a bit behind, but really I’m only competing against the person who I used to be, and if I’m only competing against her, I’m winning every day because I’m creating this habit of writing for myself... and for any audience that I may get
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...
