My Challenge to Me

So. Here I am. I haven't written in a long time, but I don't apologize. I've done a lot over the past few (or many, depending on your definition) months, and there are only so many hours in a day. Physics is as bad as I expected, and my other classes aren't exactly easy. I wrote 50,000 (actually more) words of my novel this November, winning NaNoWriMo for the second time.

And really, that brings me to the reason that I'm updating today. I am going to start blogging again, because I've started a project of my own. It isn't quite like NaNo, but it's similar. For the next year, from now, until February fifth, 2011, I plan to write at least a little every day. It can be an essay for English, more of my novel, a short story, or a personal essay. It can be one hundred words, or several thousand. My only requirement will be that there is writing. This blog will document these words. I'll probably be keeping track of what I write and when, and I may post it on this blog.

I feel that there is a certain nice symmetry in starting this today. Three months ago, to the day, was November fifth. I was still getting into the swing of a school year that is harder than I expected, and I expected a lot. I was struggling with Physics, and honestly feeling lonely. I had concluded that I could not do National Novel Writing Month this year, not with all of the time that I had to devote to homework. I laid aside plans to write, to never miss a NaNo again after last year, my first. I did my homework. But I could not stop thinking about writing. I wanted to do it. I was going crazy with my work load, but on that friday, November fifth, I came home and sat down to write.

It was not an awesome English class that inspired me, as you might expect. It was not talking to a friend, a teacher, a family member who encouraged me. Instead, it was a chemistry lab. My partner and I made a really great density scale, to the point that the rest of the class was coming over to gaze at it in awe. Well, that may be a slight exageration, but they were impressed, so I would argue that the point stands. I was ecstatic. It had worked, and it had done so at jus the right moment. That afternoon when I sat down to write, I started by doing 1000 words. Then I went to dance. Then I came home and wrote another two thousand words. I wrote three thousand more each on saturday and sunday, and on the 28th of November I hit 50,000 words two days early, even though I had started five days late.

So now, sitting in my room, tapping away at my computer, I am setting myself a challenge three months later. I haven't written anything, not really, since the first few days of December. But now I will. Now I am going to write every day. I'm going to do it for a year, and I'm going to do it because even though that month was hard in some ways, and really busy, it was sort of worth it. Because I have never felt as alive as I did during these past two Novembers. Because writing really is what makes me tick in some basic sense that I can't explain to save my life. But maybe by writing I'll learn how. So here I am. I'm announcing my plan, even if I'm saying it to a world that isn't listening. And I'm doing that because I have to. Because I have to tell someone, even if someone is really no one. Because now that I've told you, I have to do it. Because I can't back out, I can't quit. I don't have it in me. If I did, I would be out of physics by now.

So here it goes: A yearlong project started on a date that doesn't matter, to do something that the world will not look at. I, Emuroo, will write something every day for the next year. I will post some of it for you to see, and at the end I'll tell you how much there is, even if you aren't there. It'll be awesome.

That stuff you see up there? That's day one.