Seventy Days of Sweat!

It's funny the way things work. (Not a profound thought, to be sure. But it's late... gimme a break.) Anyway, I've been trying to motivate myself to write, and it's been working some of the time. I treat myself to Oreos if I hit 200 words and then go for a jog. Unfortunately I skipped the jog tonight; no chocolatey cookies for me.

Anyway, Jonathan is in the midst of rejeuvenating my blog. (The new look should be posted in a few days and it is awesome. My husband is the best.) He suggested that I search the web for personal blogs and compile some ideas for cool blog features, etc. While he was at Book Club, I started browsing. It was a slow start, but then I discovered whole lists of blogs maintained by authors (both renowned and unknown). Who better to keep a blog than a writer? I should have known.

So, I began slogging through that quagmire and happened upon several cool blogs kept by writers of my ilk... unpublished wannabes with semi-impressive vocabularies and enough commitment to post multiple times a month. And one of those blogs in particular caught my eye because the girl keeping it had begun posting a progress bar relevant to the novel she has recently begun.

I loved that idea. A public commitment to the word count. In essence, this young lady was pushing herself out of the "I wanna be a writer. I blog. Does that count?" mentality, and into a much more productive frame of mind. I wanted to adopt it as my own. Of course, I'd give her credit. But then I realized that she was giving the credit to someone else.

On author Alison Kent's blog, she had posted a challenge to all authors in the blogosphere:

I hereby challenge any of you who are interested to sign up for our Seventy Days of Sweat. The challenge begins on Sunday, July 8 and runs through Thursday, September 20.

We, the authors, pluck our pet projects from the gardens of our minds and water then consistantly for 70 days (you'll see she's padded the time frame by a week, which I appreciate). And our commitment to multiple pages of work each day is public. We check in for the purposes of monitoring. And we have access to articles by published authors full of tips on how to write dialogue, how to move a character out of a room, how to polish technique. You know... boring author stuff. (Fascinating to me, but whatever!)

I signed up. And so now I'm going to attempt to complete my first draft, no matter how shoddy, how full of holes, how flawed. By September 20, 2007 I want 75,000 words, be they good, bad or ugly. From there I can move with more purpose and confidence. It will take an average of 1,200 words per day. As of now, I have 3,500. Some of it is solid, some is beautiful. Some sucks. But it's the burgeoning idea that counts.

Whether or not I commit to another author's website, though, I'd like to state it here, too.

Title: Being Memory (subject to change)
Genre: Fiction/Drama
Length: Approx. 75,000 words

Wish me luck. I'll definitely post my progress here. Any and all encouragement is appreciated. This could be a LONG seventy days.