I am proud of myself for committing to a challenge I set forth and seeing it through. I am really happy with what came out of this month of writing and I am honestly surprised by how easy I found it. I thought I would struggle a lot more, that I would miss days left and right and that I would struggle more on what to write. Neither of those were the case. Posting this month was such a natural addition to my daily routine and very nearly the second I sat down to write every night, I had words to say. I found this practice to be very rewarding, and it acted as a sort of bolstering for my skills—it reminded me that sometimes you just need to shake off a little bit of rust. Your skills for creating are still there, they just need to be re-honed a bit.
For July, I am not going to be posting every day. My July is quite a bit busier than my June and I know I will miss a few days and I do not want to go into the month knowing that I will not meet a goal I am setting for myself. My goals are supposed to work for me, which means they need to be set in my best interest, in a way that pushes me but also sets me up for something that works for me.
It was really easy this month to write about whatever thought flitted through my head that night. i didn’t put much work into each entry, and I didn’t force myself to craft a clean narrative from each one. I didn’t even make myself edit if I didn’t want to. While that worked for June, I want something different for July. For July, I only need to write one post a week. I will post it on Sundays, which should put me around four posts in July. These need to have more care and effort and need to be more edited. They need to look a lot more like creative nonfiction than a straight journal entry. The goal will still be to work on the pieces a little bit every day, but the posting will only come once a week.
My goal is for this to help me practice crafting narratives again. I need to shake off the rust in picking a topic, one that can sustain a full narrative, and then seeing that piece through to the end. I want to get back to writing fuller pieces, which means I have to actually do it. It feels, somehow, a little more daunting than my challenge in June, but I am not making tall demands of myself, so I think I can do it.
Here’s to another month of writing!
