Writeathons – good or not?

A couple of weeks ago I came across an opportunity that I couldn’t resist.  The opportunity to participate in a 10 day shutupandwriteathon.  Now if that seems like a strange title, it is.  The purpose was to challenge yourself to write for a set period of time each day.  You got to choose the time – 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes…etc.  I chose 10 minutes for my time and each day I found that I was still writing when the timer went off.  How exciting since I hadn’t been writing much over the past few months.

Each day we were given some prompts to help us think about something to write, but we had the choice to write on the prompts or on anything else we wanted, or to not even write, but to celebrate the fact that we had showed up for this writeathon.  I enjoyed each day of the writeathon, but just after Day 8 (which was the battle of the wolves), my mean wolf stopped me and I didn’t finish Day 9 or Day 10.  However, I was determined that I would be the winner in this battle and so I spent some time working on completing my writing.

What follows is the result of Day 10’s task, “to write a blog post of 500 words telling a story about your experience, with a headline and bulleted list with 5 things you learned.”

Okay.  Here I am ready to do my final task for my SSUAW.  I feel I should/want/need to congratulate myself for finishing the project.  For overcoming procrastination for getting back to it despite the interruption of a few days.

I have continued going to the Facebook page and reading what others have written and combined with the other things I am currently doing I feel energized.  I have written several blog posts today, both for my BANABU blog and my SimpleStepsToSpeakingSuccess blog.  I have made a commitment to finally get my poems published in Kindle.  I shared one of my poems in a closed group and the response was powerful and very affirming.

Being in this group was life changing in that I wrote something pretty much every day for 2 weeks, including revamping a Time Management workshop.

Being a part of this group allowed me to get insight from other s on their journey, to provide supportive comments, to learn from their posts and struggles, and to know that it’s okay to celebrate the failures because they too are part of life and we can learn from them.

The experience of dealing with the mean wolf led to more in-depth work along with some other reading I was doing and I realized that the truly mean wolf, the paradigm/ego one, is PROCRASTINATION.  This is the wolf that has kept me circling and not progressing, but NO MORE.

This wolf and I will now be fighting it out and I am going to win!  I am going to move forward.  I am going to commit to projects and give myself deadlines to complete them.  I am going to publish my poems on Kindle.  I am going to start writing poetry and articles again.  I haven’t written any poems or articles for quite a while.  My creative juices were all but dried up and now they are flowing again.

I am going to use a calendar to mak off the days when I successfully write something, anything, even a letter to my daughter or to a friend.  I am going to keep on writing my blog posts about my journey, both in SSAW and Power Manifesting.

I am going to write speeches.  I have had a LONG dry spell and it’s time to get going again.  I have manuals to finish.  I will review my manuals and set some deadlines to complete them.

I am moving forward thanks to Stella Orange and the ShutUpAndWriteathon, so to answer my initial question in the headline – Writeathons good or not – my answer is GOOD for sure.

Thanks Stella Orange and all the other people who participated for sharing their aedventures!

To your speaking & writing success

Fran Watson

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