Day 97

Day 97:

It's strange to be this close to the end. 

I know that I will continue to write after this, and that writing these 100 days is only the first part of the journey to turn this into a book, yet I cannot help but consider whether or not I have achieved the goals that I set out when I began. In terms of writing every day, I have consistently written something for 97 consecutive days, even when I was on holiday. The length and, let's be honest, the quality of the writing does vary quite a bit. Some days I spent more than an hour writing, although rarely less than 15 minutes. Some days, the words would just flow, and I'd write paragraphs without really stopping or realising how quickly I was going. On other days, progress would be painfully slow. Interestingly, the days with the slower progress are the ones I ended up liking the least when I'd finished them, although this may change when I come to re-read them all. Doing anything creative, just living your life in general, can be much harder on some days than it is on others. However, it's important to always consistently show up and do what you can. Knowing that I would do this no matter what was happening in my day made the bad days easier, and the good days greater.

In terms of improving as a writer.... That is probably going to vary depending on who you ask. Grammatically speaking, I've probably gotten slightly worse at writing. I haven't done much in the way of researching the grammatically correct ways of writing, so any bad habits I did have before have likely been engrained. However, you could hold the view that the 'correct' grammar is the grammar that conveys the points that the author is trying to make the most effectively. Some of what I've written has become quite hard to read (like the previous sentence), and while there are circumstances in which that would be effective, I don't think that most of my writing falls into that category. If it's not intentional, than it's a mistake, and it's one that I need to work on going forward. I also haven't been very concise, and often use far more words than necessary to illustrate a point that could be made with far less prose. Throughout this experiment, I have been using the writing assistant extension 'Grammarly', mostly using it for spelling errors. Interestingly, I often find myself disagreeing with it's recommendations on sentence structure, word choice etc.  For example, it wants me to take the apostrophe out of 'it's' in the last sentence. I'll let you decide on that one.

In these last couple of days before Day 100, I'm going to try to produce some really interesting pieces. They will probably be a bit longer, and I may even think about them beforehand. I'm aware that the last time I tried this didn't go particularly well, but I'd rather try and fail than not try at all. That's quite a good summary of this book, come to think of it... 

Probably not the best thing to put on the blurb though.