Day 6, Winter 2023, Mini 1000
Hi friends.
Today we will write 1000 words. To mark our imperfections and try to improve on them. Because we are imperfect human beings in so many ways, reflections of the messy world around us. But on the page we can always strive for greatness, or at least goodness. We can sort through all the nonsense around us (sometimes nonsense of our own making, or at least it’s that way for me) and try to arrive at a place of understanding, if not betterment. Even if these shifts and changes are not obvious on the page, perhaps we can see it, feel it, subtly within us. Those thousand words — or however many you get to — are part of the slow march we can take in this life to a more thorough comprehension of our personal universe.
Do you know what your next steps are after this? I wrote all the new scenes I needed for my novel, and I’m on to revisions after this, though I’ve still a long time to go on it yet. I begin this as I started: with a new to-do list. But a shorter one, I think. (I hope, please, for the love of God.)
Can you take the time today to assess what you accomplished and where you want to go after this? Can you think for a moment about how to build upon it? And can you pat yourself on your back a little bit, too?
I genuinely hope you got something out of this week. It felt like a worthy use of my time, and I hope it was for you, too. I valued you being here along with me. I showed up every day because I knew you were writing, too. There were 5,755 of you as of this morning. I felt y’all. Thank you for being here.
After this, I’ll be back over at the Craft Talk newsletter weekly. There will be a big all-star #1000wordsofsummer starting on June 17, for two weeks, and I’ll do another Mini 1000 this fall sometime, so stay signed up for this newsletter if you think you’ll be interested in doing that.
Thank you again for your subscriptions, and again, if you’d like to support me, I have eight books, including a fresh new paperback.
Now stop reading this, and start writing your words. One step closer to understanding.
Jami
A few weeks ago I finished my first novel. Finished but not done. Finished as in I completed the third draft and felt confident enough to write "The End" on the last page. It's been nearly four years in the writing, planning, crafting, thinking, revising. I used the printers at the library to print it out - 292 pages. It's been sitting and marinating. It's been in the corner each of these #1000words days, waiting for me. I chose to ignore it. I did mental embroidery instead, thinking about my characters and who they are. So when I pick up that stack of paper I might have a better sense of who they are and am I reflecting that in the story?
As I said previously, it has been fun to write this week without an agenda. To just write for fun. Today was harder, because I put an agenda on my #1000 words and only got to about 899 (brain sez: C'mon, you can't do 100 more words???).
Last week I wrote this down on an index card: "This year I will own my identity as a writer. "This challenge is helping me do that. And oh! how inspired I've been by Jami and the 5,000++ others doing it too. Thank you!
Writing as "part of the slow march we can take in this life to a more thorough comprehension of our personal universe." "One step closer to understanding." That is EXACTLY it. No matter what else happens with what I'm writing now, I am figuring out something that I need to understand--laying it down in sentences, word by word, sentences that I have to figure out as I go. That's the work, and that's the value.
1104 today. Thank you for this week, Jami!