So, it is now the first of may. It has been four months and this is still going. I have only made four slip ups so far, out of 120 drabbles, which gives me a pass rate of over 96%. I may have used a calculator for that because, while I'm usually pretty good at maths and should have been able to work that out in my head, I'm tired and I'm also lazy.
I'll be honest here: I had expected to have given up by now. The whole reason I took this project on was because I know I tend not to follow things through, and this occurs particularly frequently in my writing. I get bored a couple of chapters in to a new story, so I drop it and move on to something new. I decide I'm going to write something to submit to a journal or anthology but as soon as I sit down to write it I lose interest. By taking on such a large project and putting it up on the internet for everybody to see, I had hoped to force myself to see something through, and not something that would be easy. Something that's been hard and tiring and demanding, something that I've sometimes honestly hated myself for doing.
I don't expect the next eight months are going to be any easier. A hundred words isn't much, of itself, but sitting down every day to write out that 100 words? That's hard. Most of these have taken no longer than five, ten minutes to write, but most are written immediately before I go to bed and sitting down to write when you're tired and want to go to sleep isn't the easiest thing to do.
But as hard as this has been, and as hard as this will continue to be, at no point have I ever doubted that this has been worth it. I've done a lot of things that I never expected to do, a lot of things that I've never wanted to do, and I've done a lot of things that I had wanted to do but had never quite been prepared to try. I had never expected to turn Raven's horse into a pegasus, but writing when I'm too tired to keep together something coherent has led to some interesting plot twists. I never wanted to go anywhere near as meta with these stories as I have done, and I certainly need intended for "The Author" to play as large a roll in many of these as s/he has, and yet so many times I've crossed over that lines that I'm starting to see "The Author" more as another character, a chalked up parody of myself, something that I never intending, and it's gotten me questioning my own relationship to my work and the role I play in this world I've created. I certainly never intending to get all philosophical on y'all.
I have, however, for a long while wanted to include some more of Raven's backstory, to flesh him out as a character. I'm finally starting to do that, bit by bit, and 100 words at a time is far less daunting than putting it straight into 5000. I've also wanted to write a short story straight into wingdings for some time, and, again, 100 words is far less daunting than 5000.
The one thing I'm most grateful for, above being forced to see something through, to write every day rather than putting it off until tomorrow, is that it's pushed me to do so much with my writing that I otherwise would never have done. It's challenged me as a writer, and I can proudly say that these past four months I have faced that challenge rather than running from it as I would have done this same time last year.
There have also been a few other challenges, most notably those purporting to technical difficulties. I still haven't quite caught back up with my uni work after my laptop crashed and I lost all of my work, but during the fortnight I had no laptop I still managed to come into the library every day and get a drabble written (I also did a lot of overnights in the library, since I had to start all of my essays again from scratch).
Ultimately, this whole experience has forced me to better myself, both as a writer and a person. It's meant I've had to be proactive, I've had to write something every day rather than sitting around and waiting for inspiration to strike, I've had to write when I've been tired or drunk or ill or just not in the mood. It's meant I've had to be consistant. I couldn't take a day out without defeating the purpose of the whole project.
But this has been a lot about me. Now, I want to talk about what's really made a difference here. I check the stats on blogspot (tumblr doesn't appear to have an application for that) every couple of days, just to see. As I am typing this, the blogspot for The Acellevin Project has had 569 pageviews throughout its entire history. The vast majority of those have come from the USA, the UK and Germany, but there have also been views from Poland, Serbia, Belgium and Russia. I do not know how many of these are return viewers, how many stayed and read and how many just glanced and moved on, but somehow people have stumbled upon this. I have done little to nothing in terms of advertisement - I've mentioned it to a few people I know, on- and off-line, and posted a link in a couple of places, but other than that I've done little more than write these. That sonebody, somewhwhere, is reading them means a lot. It is a big part of what motivates me to sit there and write them when I'm tired and want to go to sleep, to get the bus into campus when it's raining, to type with my left hand when I tore a muscle and couldn't use my right arm. The fact that on any given day I can log on to blogger and check the stats, and I can be sure that within the last 24 hours there will be at least one view (and I've set it not to track my own views) means that I'm not in this on my own. I may not know any of the viewers, who they are or how they got here, but that there are people viewing this makes a difference. So for that, for the viewers on blogspot that I can see and any viewers on tumblr that I can't, thank you. This has been hard, yes, and it's only going to get harder the further through the year I get, but it would have been harder without you all.
I realise that I've rambled a lot, and got a little soppy towards the end here. This is a big milestone on this project, one that I wasn't always certain I would reach, and while I may not be at the finish-line quite yet, I'm pretty chuffed to have made it as far as I have. So, here's to four months down, and another eight left to go :D
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