Skip to main content

17

On my seventeenth birthday I made a decision: I decided that I would write 50,000 words in a year. You may have heard of NaNoWriMo? Well I'm doing that but over a year... so NaNoWriYe (not go the same ring to it really...).

I've decided that I don't want to write anything amazing or profound, I just want to have written words - 50,000 of them. I think if I can show myself that I can do that then I can focus on content and all this.

This month so far I have written 2,365 words. That's 4.73% of my 50,000 target and 51.41% of my month's target (of 4,600 words).

I don't know about you, but having always tried to write a large body of words creatively and not being able to succeed, this is an achievement for me. I'm not saying what I have written so far is good. I'm saying it's something. It's a start. For that reason, I am happy. (And going to read for a bit now.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Teens don't read"

Earlier today Maureen Johnson pointed out that the view of "teens don't read" in the UK is deeply entrenched (which is a word that I now love  and had never heard before). As a teenager in the UK, the stigma around reading seems to be - to me - it's "uncool", it's "geeky", there "aren't any good books out there". I think the fact that a lot of teenagers in British schools are exposed to older literature or, perhaps, not that popular literature in lessons and forced into over-analysing and spending countless hours on 'what the author meant'. A point that was raised in this twitter discussion was that people didn't want to be seen reading, or didn't want to be seen reading certain books. It's made me realise that I never   ever ever  see people reading in the older years in my school ( ever ). Perhaps the odd year 7 (12 year old) or year 8 (13 year old) will read, but - from experience - they will probably be ...
4 comments
Read more

Ask FML

Ask FM infuriates me. I'm not going to take a moral high-ground and say I've never asked a question on it, because that would be lying but it still makes me angry. (Note that you can in fact dislike something that you have partaken in previously...) I can understand the appeal to both asking and answering questions - yeah, it can get some good conversation going. What I don't understand is that those two people could have that perfectly civilised conversation about all those deep and meaningful questions without the anonymity. Furthermore, why does someone immediately think "oh, I'm bored I KNOW let's post a link to ask.fm on my facebook/twitter page"? If you're bored go and do talk to people (text, phone, family, skype DO IT), read a book, make a video, write a blog post. Why ask people ask you questions? I just... I guess I don't get it. I have seen people horrendously bullied on formspring and ask fm and yet they continue to allow themselv...
2 comments
Read more

Ten books that have shaped my decade

As this decade draws to an end, I’ve decided to take a look back at the last ten years and see what books have truly impacted my life. Choosing these was hard – for one thing, I’ve read a lot of books (663 since 2011) and for another, it’s harder to distance yourself from the ones you’ve read most recently. Ask me in five years, and this list may have changed! Books have fundamentally shaped me, from the ages of 14 to 24. So much has changed, including myself. Without these books, times would have been darker, more difficult to overcome, and I definitely would have felt a lot more alone. Books have brought me closer to people, they’ve made me friends, they’ve given me something to talk (gush) about, and they’ve eaten up a whole lot of time and money (not one moment or penny do I regret!). This year I fell back in love with going to the library, a habit I seemed to forget to do as a teenager/young adult. I urge you to go there, see what they have waiting for you on the shelves (...
Post a Comment
Read more