Saturday, December 01, 2007

Farewell 'Your Messages'

November has finished and the Your Messages blog project is sadly over.

It has been both challenging and inspirational, so I managed to post my 300 word piece for every single day of the month. To be honest it was not too hard to write exactly 300 words each day, given that we had a prompt to start from and writing to length is actually one of my strengths. My approach to the task was simple. I read Lynne and Sarah's prompt piece, wrote my own response and only after I had posted it did I read what others had written.

Looking back on what I have written I can see that some are better than others, but that is only to be expected. What is important is that I am not ashamed of any of them, no matter how quickly and roughly they had to be written and I think that my true writing 'voice' shines through. It was actually all a lot easier than I had expected, though I did find myself running out of steam a little in the last week when I was trying to write my OU assignments as well.

I had a reason for doing this project every day. I wanted to prove to myself that I am capable of writing at least 300 words everyday, no matter what else is going on. That is something I can now take back to my novel and as a start I have written over 300 more words of it this morning. 300 words or more a day is 9000-10,000 a month, my first draft could be complete in 7-8 months if I can stick at it.

Now there's a thought...

Three notable things:

1. Finishing Your Messages yesterday. I will really miss it.

2. Hubby's motor insurance certificate is lost somewhere in the post which means he hasn't been able to get his new tax disc and will have to borrow my car next week.

3. X Factor is on again tonight. My money is still on Rhydian, if they can give him good enough songs. His versions of 'You Raise Me Up' and 'Somewhere' have been technically superb. Though I'm not sure if I would actually buy a whole album of his music, as I don't really listen to much classical crossover.

8 comments:

Anne Brooke said...

It's so great that you know you can do that - such an inspiration!

A
xxx

Casdok said...

Well done! And look forward to reading your book!

Jenny Beattie said...

Well done for all your messages. I think that's a brilliant accomplishment.
JJx

rilly super said...

cathy, if he renews his tax online it doesn't matter if he's lost the certificate as the DVLA have his insurance on their own records, or so I'm told; my husband deals with all that kind of thing of course, sigh

david mcmahon said...

As someone who writes a bit, I can clearly sense your disappointment that the project is over.

But maybe you'd care to write a project of your own - by devoting your attention to a book, perhaps ....

Anonymous said...

Rhydian is indeed a great singer. I watched him sing last week and I hold my hands up; it actually made me cry. His voice is superb. I would vote for him if I was voting at all.

Get that book written. You know you can.

Crystal xx

Cathy said...

Anne,casdok and JJ,thanks!

Rilly, I've passed that on, thank you.

David...I do have a novel in progress. It is just that I had become rather demotivated and the messages project helped to get me back into the habit of writing a little every day rather than procrastinating much of the time.

Crystal, my word count has gone up by about 750 over the weekend. Not bad for me! For me Rhydian is at his best when he sings ballads...like 'Somewhere' last week.

Lane Mathias said...

Hats off to you for that achievement. That's quite something. Well done:-)