I am the queen of self-inflicted challenges. I love a good challenge: 30 days or 100 days. It is a key part of how I get things done which I am often asked about.
For the last several years I have self-inflicted a #last100days of the year project.
100 days has many significant places in my life. When I taught lower elementary, we celebrated 100 days of school. I had all types of 100 activities planned for that day. I celebrated the first 100 days of marriage with my husband too!
It is a nice round number I am drawn to. You can do something with it. It is important.
What will you do for the last 100 days of 2023?
As of today, there are 108 days left in 2023. (See? Planning time!)
For the last 100 days, I invite you to join me and try on my practice. I will share a writing prompt and then encourage you to begin a new piece of writing with an image, use an old piece of writing of your own, and use the prompt.
Or, if you’d rather, you can just write to the prompt or create your own last 100 day project.
Starting next week, I will share a prompt with you. You are welcome to write on your own, share in the comments, or email it to me!
I would love to hear about your plans in the comments!
I have found over the years that constraints make me more creative. There is lots of research that backs this up which I will not link here (but I am tempted).
My past 100-day projects have included writing and sharing daily writing prompts, writing daily poems, writing one random sentence that turned into a story after the challenge was over, and the 100 rejections that morphed into 100 submissions. The 100 submissions project yielded a collection I published.
Many ideas have swirled around my head for what project to pursue these past few days. I thought about one yoga pose day. I thought about something that had to do with tarot or fairy tales.
One past project that was delightful for me was the random sentence project.I took a list of words from my notebook, wrote a random sentence and posted it in IG.
Have you ever done a 100-day project? I would love to hear about it in the comments!
My friend Diane F tried to comment and she was having trouble. Here is her response:
"I've never done a 100 day challenge, never really thought about the significance of "100 days". I've certainly done 30 day challenges. And I have lifetime challenges too! (Write, exercise, and meditate--every day.) This is a good reminder to set these types of goals to get things done. I'm at a tricky part in both my old and new novels, and find that I am great at procrastinating. I've been thinking of this issue as summer got pretty busy near the end, making writing challenging. I'm off to meditate for a week and come back to a calmer energy (I hope) and a plan for the last 100 days."
I'm 100% up for your challenge(s) Tammy, sounds like FUN and something I can shoe-horn into my day.
I started my new novel, am just about 5K words in, aiming to complete the first draft by Christmas. I can't think of any challenges I've done except getting into the daily prompts habit since this summer.