A self Imposed Challenge

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

My relationship with Vocal is much the same as my relationship with everyone and everything in my life, chaotic and sporadic and not very well maintained. I joined vocal in 2017 and I’ve published 9 stories that, truth be told, I probably could have written a lot better than I did.

HERE’S WHERE WE MAKE A CHANGE

And by we, I mean I, because quite frankly I’m getting bored with my own excuses and you’re probably doing a lot better than I am at the writing thing. And if you’re not, trust me, you couldn’t be doing any worse.

So, May is going to be a little bit different, May is going to see me do the opposite of what I’m normally inclined to do. ( Which is generally speaking not very much at all.) And I predict that one of two things will happen this month, I will either rejuvenate my relationship with Vocal or it will be the month in which I hurl my poor old laptop off the balcony never to write again.

If you politely ignore that it’s already May 3rd, I’m challenging myself to write a vocal article a day for May, and not only because it sounds catchy… I have a serious writer's block that I need to rid myself of and a vocal+ subscription that I need to justify the cost of.

THE “RULES”

Do I have any rules for this challenge? Well yes, I do in fact have one rule thank you for wondering.

All of the submissions have to be original and not something I’ve hastily requisitioned from my google docs, re-edited, and thrown thoughtlessly at this challenge because I’ve been either too lazy or forgotten to write.

That’s it, the bar is low enough for me to achieve the goal and not so high that I lose my fairly feeble nerve and that’s fine by me. A goal is a goal, no matter the size. Also considering that my normal output is laughably minimal I’m going to look like a chronic overachiever by the end of the month regardless of how much I write. The fact that I’m already at 254 words of this article and I’m struggling is slightly worrying but we’ll blame that on the writer's block and not my propensity to become easily distracted (by the other four tabs I have open on my laptop while I’m writing this) and disenchanted with any task I set myself.

WILL I SUCCEED?

Well, it’s funny you should ask…

I have no idea if I’ll succeed, but the world is so full of people being sure of their path to successful achievements that I feel the need to create some balance here.

Actually, if we push aside my very real need to self-deprecate what I’m actually doing here is giving myself permission to write. Whether it’s good or bad or mediocre I am giving myself permission to write. And maybe it needs to be variations of all of the above in order to actually craft something worth reading.

Will writing an article a day mean that I write some bad stuff that doesn’t resonate? Possibly,

But it might also mean that I manage to let go of some of the things I allow to hold me back, and if a few bits of sketchy writing get churned out on the way towards that, that’s ok. This month isn’t about perfection, it’s just about getting some writing done.

I’ll also maybe try and remember to have some fun along the way…