Sideways as usual!

BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY: I’d just like to say THANK YOU to all of you. @mariannewest convinced me to join this despite having been reluctant, and I thought I would last like, less than five days before giving up on it. Of course, I’m pretty stubborn about following through when I commit to something, even if it’s a commitment that nobody was forcing me to stay in. I had only ever written one freewrite before this. I suppose I determined that I didn’t really have anything to lose by giving it a shot, and maybe I’d make a few more friends.

What came out of these 50 days far exceeded my expectations. First of all, prior to this, I had never really written fiction, save for that one freewrite, and some (appropriately) incoherent childhood attempts. I was under the impression that I just couldn’t do it and that I didn’t have much of a creative brain. I had written a couple of poems in my life, but they seemed like one off efforts in times of distress that basically weren’t replicable. I knew that I was a good writer in the sense that I was good enough to get into and survive the history department at a top tier grad school, and good enough that people would pay me small amounts of money to write articles for their online publications, but conducting and summarizing research was a totally different skill set than creating something out of nothing.

It totally shocked me to learn that YES, I can get out of my comfort zone and create something out of nothing (or, well, something from one word). Not only that, I could do it In 5 minutes (or 10-15, if you count editing and putting in photos and stuff). Not only that, it was actually pretty good by my standards. I would read them and show them to my friends because I was actually proud of them. One of my freewrites was even curie’d, and that felt pretty good. Sometimes I think I might have grand ambitions of like, writing a novel one day, or something. Maybe. We’ll see.

I also made a few new friends whose writing consistently inspires me, and whose comments motivate me to keep going.

In short, despite having had (quite frankly) very low expectations for how this 50 days would go, at least in terms of what I would create from it, and despite having kind of hit a wall at around day 35, and even despite being sick for the last 10 days—so much so that I couldn’t even look at a screen other than to do those freewrites for a couple of days of it—there have been few, if any, experiences that have contributed so much to my creative development.

Sorry to be all cheesy and stuff. Y’all are great. I’ll miss your selfies. I will not miss posting my own selfies.