Several people have asked for a 31-day challenge for March after completing their 29-day challenge in February, so here it is, modified from the 30-day challenge in the The Steal Like An Artist Journal:
Pick something small to do every day. Fill the boxes. Don’t break the chain!
A few years ago, I gave up on New Year’s Resolutions. (April might be the cruelest month, but January feels like the longest.)
Now, if I make any resolutions at all, I make them in February. It’s short, therefore it brings the quickest sense of accomplishment to a new daily habit.
If you, too, would like to make a February resolution, here’s an easy, lo-fi way to keep track of your progress, adapted from the 30-day challenge in the The Steal Like An Artist Journal, and modified for the leap year:
Download and print the .PDFPick something small to do every day. Fill the boxes. Don’t break the chain!
For anybody doing NaNoWriMo or the equivalent, here’s an easy, lo-fi way to keep track of your progress, adapted from The Steal Like An Artist Journal:
Do the work every day. Fill the boxes. Don’t break the chain!
Friday’s newsletter was inspired by our recent trip to New Mexico.
It ended on this note about travel:
I am a big believer that travel doesn’t relieve your problems, it throws them into relief. You see your life in a new light and new shadows. The desert light can be good for this. At its peak, it is harsh and unforgiving, but at dusk and dawn it softens, becomes more mysterious. Every trip has its challenges, but I returned home, as I often do, with a sense of perspective and a clarity about what I want to do next. What more could one ask for? (“Go away so you can come back.”)
What I liked most about New Mexico was being in the forests and the deserts outside of town.
In Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac, a fictional Richard Feynman says:
Los Alamos was high up on a mesa with tall cliffs carved in dark red earth, lots of trees and shrubs all around. The landscape was breathtaking, the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. Coming from New York, I’d never traveled out to the West before, so I really felt like I was in another world. In Mars or something. It had the strange energy of a sacred space, a haven far away from the civilized world, away from prying eyes, farther than God could see. The perfect spot to do the unimaginable.
Read more in “The Land of Enchantment.”
Today’s newsletter is about some of my favorite writing books like What It Is, Bird By Bird, and Several Short Sentences About Writing:
In attempting to practice what I preach with my own “practice and suck less” challenge, I bottomed out so bad last week that I had to do that most embarrassing of things that writers occasionally have to do: I reached out for help from a writing book. (Unfortunately, my own books don’t really work on me.)
The book I reached for was new to me: Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life. I felt comforted after only a few pages. (How much more pleasant it is to read about how to write than to write!)
As I kept reading, a thought popped in my head: Every writing book is good.
Every writing book is good if it gets you to write! It doesn’t even need to be that good. In fact, it could be bad! You could be reading it and think, “Shoot, I could do better than this” or “I’d rather write than read any more of this crap.” Either way, the writing book has done its job if you put it down and head off to write.
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