I spent most of my day at a careers workshop. You know the sort of thing. A couple of awkward ice breakers, some tips on how to write a better CV and a bunch of the latest recruiting mumbo jumbo. Some bits were interesting, some of it less so. I mostly went because I thought there might be some useful tidings I could apply to expanding my freelancing. And you can never rule out having a day job.
So I was in the sort of mood to be thinking seriously about where I can go from here, and how I can make sure the the trajectory is always upwards. Thinking about my writing. I put on a podcast talking about writing every day.
The idea of developing a daily writing habit isn't something that's new to me. I've been working on that very thing and I'm just about hitting that at the moment. Not quite every day, but most days. And it's done wonders for my word count.
What was new was the idea of publishing every day. Putting the words out there keeps you accountable and it's easy to see when a day has been missed.
The advice was geared up towards bloggers (which I guess I am the technically but shush) but then I thought, what if I wrote a story every day and published it on my blog? There are lots of options for selling the rights afterwards. Or for bundling it with others as ebooks.
If I put a story on my blog every day for a year then at the end of the year I'll have 365 stories at the very least. With a bit of luck I'll have an excellent writing habit and the will have improved by leaps and bounds. Really there's nothing to lose my trying.
So I will try. Starting tomorrow the first thing I'll do every day is write a short flash story and then I'll put it up here. And then I'll send it out and see if I can get it published elsewhere too. And when I've done that I can get on with the rest of my day; freelance jobs, other writing projects, editing. I'll have started my day right.
And in the end that's all I can do.
