365.100 (Aargh), originally uploaded by kpwerker.
I’ve failed my 365-self-portraits challenge, but I’ve decided that, as the agent of my own destiny, I’m going to own my missed days (I missed more than just my 100th day), and soldier on. I’ve been suffering creatively, and I was aware that I was blowing the challenge each day I didn’t take a photo. It’s not like I forgot. I also fell about six weeks behind in posting photos to Flickr, but I’m now all caught up.
Part of my motivation to get all my photo-posting under control is that I’ve committed myself to yet another creative challenge — one I’m sure I’ll fail. But I’m not doing it to win. I’m doing it because I just really, really want to.
Starting tomorrow, I’ll participate in NaNoWriMo. Never have I attempted to write prose fiction. Never have I aspired to write a novel. But I have the tiniest of tiny ideas, and I want to kick myself out of this creative rut I’ve been stuck in, and so in the month of November I, along with tens of thousands of other writers, will attempt to write a 50K-word “novel”. I use virtual air quotes there because it’s not like writing 50K words in thirty days will result in anything worth reading. What I’m aiming for is to commit myself to spend time seeing if my tiniest of tiny ideas will be fun to explore and expand.
I know I’m doomed to fail not because I’m being hard on myself for missing a few days on my portrait challenge, nor because I don’t think I could do it, but mostly because we go to press in the middle of the month and that means I’ll be in Colorado for a week, living in a hotel, not getting enough sleep, and suffering a headache and bloody nose from the altitude. So maybe I should adjust my goal by 25% and consider myself a quasi-winner if I make it to 37.5K words.
No matter my final word count, I’m very much looking forward to it. You can keep track of my progress here*. Let the insanity begin!
* The NaNoWriMo site is down at the time I’m posting this. It’s a Drupal site, and it’s run slowly for the last few days. (I mention the Drupal bit because I’m intimately familiar with the speed challenges Drupal can present.)
I feel both your pain viz the creative block, and the monolithic challenge of NaNo. I will consider myself successful if I double the number of words I spewed out last year, which means my personal goal is only 6K. This year I have buddies, though, and that may make all the difference.