My 500 Words: A Writing Challenge
To start off 2014, I’m entering Jeff Goins' My 500 Words. It is a 31-day writing challenge designed to help a writer find the
discipline to write at least 500 words a day.
Being a minimalist who advocates living a
focused life of purpose, why am I joining this challenge?
Two Reasons
Two Reasons
1. First is because I’m a writer, and it’s my
purpose to write every day. This is another way of reminding myself that. To
increase accountability, I’ll be recording my progress in a simple excel file
and will post my updates on this blog’s Facebook page every day starting today
(January 3) to January 31.
2. I’m writing my first self-published novel
titled Sometime in July. Writing fiction was my first love. I finished my first
novel when I was 19 years old, and have already written three unpublished ones.
Sometime in July was my third written in 2003, and now after more than a
decade, I’m re-writing it to become my first self-published novel to be
released thru Amazon.
I can’t wait to get started and finish this
challenge!
Starting right now
Actually, I’m beginning right now.
It’s exactly 12:00 midnight where I am now,
and I’m free-writing this blog post as my first entry for My 500 Words. Please
forgive me if you will find many grammatical errors in this post, because I won’t
edit this and post this as it is as soon as finished.
For the most part of the challenge, though, I
will be writing my novel as I hope to release it by February.
Sometime in July
Sometime in July was a novel I’d written in
2003. I’ve re-read it last November and found so many things about the novel
that I don’t agree with anymore.
I still love the story, though. It was very
close to my heart, but I found some things that I’d like to modify or improve.
Even the writing style, there are words – and whole
paragraphs – that I’d like to change, which made me decide to re-write the
whole thing.
I’m on 3,671 words as of today, after I began
re-writing in Christmas Eve. I hope to gain momentum, so to speak. Over the
past 10 years, I’ve grown into a different kind of writer, and I’m so excited
to implement all that I’ve learned to this book project.
Still, the story, as I’ve said, was one very
close to my heart. I consciously don’t use the word “very” when writing,
because Jeff Goins said it makes your writing sound weak, but I had to make an
exception for this one.
My First 500 Words
It’s exactly 445 words after this one, and 55
more to go before I finish this first entry.
I’d like to express my thanks to Jeff Goins
for initiating this challenge, and for leading the way for aspiring writers
such as myself in honing our craft.
Last month, I released my first book, a
nonfiction called Simplify Life... and Make it Count, and could really use this
encouragement to follow it up immediately with my second one.
Whew! I just passed 500 words, and I can’t
believe how breezy it was. Right off the bat, I could say that this really is
quite an experience.
And Finally
If you haven’t checked out my book yet, you
can read more about it here.
Thank you and happy writing!
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