The next 30 days

I signed up for the 30 Day "Screw Work, Let's Play Challenge" last month -- run by John Williams and Selina Barker.  It started promptly at the beginning of April, when I was still in France, snowboarding and breaking bones.  I missed the first couple of days as a result, but I'd already committed myself upfront to my chellenge: I was going to write the first chapter of my zombie novel.

At first, I was just going to "write my novel", but from what I have learned in life is that you have to know what you want to achieve in order to be able to recognise if you have achieved it.  The "acceptance criteria", as we call this sort of thing in my line of work, was too vague -- either you wrote an entire novel, or you wrote some of the novel, but both could be taken to mean you had achieved what you meant to do.  Even if you hadn't.  Much better to specify "write one chapter". So I did.

I went to Wordpress, dusted off an old domain I had there, changed the template, and I set to work.

Exactly 30 days after the Challenge started, I "launched" my project.  I had successfully written the first chapter of my novel -- something I would not have managed to do without being committed to the challenge, and answerable to a community.  Every week we would say what we would do, and at the end of the week we would say if we had achieved it.  Without the community and the challenge, the chapter would have languished, unwritten.  Just like it has done for years.

Feedback so far has been slow.  I have posted every single page of the first chapter to the Wordpress blog, and anyone who has read any of it has complimented me on the tone, style and content, but I don't yet know anyone who has read it cover-to-cover or given me any constructive criticism.  I need some honest feedback, I need to know if someone reads it and thinks one scene or another is too similar to another zombie story, if the characters are hard to follow, if the setting is too ambiguous.

It's set in Atlantic City, because of the Bruce Springsteen song by the same name that says "everything dies, baby that's a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back".  The only trouble setting it in AC is that I know nothing about the place, and despite reading factsheets and various tourist information, it's very difficult to find random bits of factual information to drop in.  My hope so far is that this won't matter too much.

So.  The challenge is over, I achieved what I said I would.  Now what?  The community gets shut down in a few days time, and people are promising each other they will stay in touch.  Do I now spend the next 30 days working on chapter 2, and trying to be answerable to someone?  Part of me is saying "Big deal, you wrote one chapter. In a month. So what?  People write entire stories in less time than that.  People are writing entire novels.  You're a hack, and you'll be lucky to write more than a couple of chapters before you get bored."

Even if I do write the whole novel, and let's say for argument's sake it will be 10 chapters long, at the current rate of progress that would take 10 months.  What then?  I have a "novel" I've written, that nobody will ever publish.  I get the satisfaction of writing, and of achieving what I want to, but will it ever break me out of my rusty cage?

I have also spoken here, once or twice or more, about the dog sledding adventure I intend to undertake.  I put it off last year as I wanted more time to raise the required sponsorship and get in shape for the trip.  I planned to sign up in March this year, but it wasn't until April that I realised there was a trip available.  I continue to put it off as I need £500 for a deposit before I can get started, and I just don't have that spare.

The 30 Day Challenge community have inadvertently started me thinking about this.  Maybe I am thinking about it all the wrong way.  Maybe I don't need to sign up for a designated charity fundraising trip -- maybe instead I select the option where I pay the full amount, and then instead I turn the whole thing into a challenge.  Not just the training, or the fundraising, or the trip itself -- but I seek out corporate sponsors, I seek out some kind of publishing deal for my journal of the adventure, I seek out personal training...  It might sound ridiculous, but I am inclined to believe this could be possible.  Not in 30 days of course, but I could start.

Did I say in my last entry I should be committed towards adventure more as a spectator than a participant?  Perhaps.  I was recently told by my therapist (who, for financial reasons, I now am going to stop seeing) that I had troubles "connecting", to people and perhaps to life, and it wa shis opinion that the attraction of adventure sports for me was, granted, partly the endorphins but also partly because it allowed me to feel "connected".

There is no grand conclusion here.  Maybe I will get chapter 2 written next month, maybe someone will give me a book deal out of nowhere for it.  Maybe I will commit myself to make the dog sled trip a bigger adventure.  Maybe I will stay sat on the couch, drinking beer, and watching my waistline expand.

Things fall into place

Image source: http://tinyurl.com/2353vye

Things today have felt a bit like they are falling into place.

I mentioned in a previous post about Marianne Cantwell's Escape Your Corporate Cage career course that I had enrolled on, after things failed to take off for me with the similar Screw Work, Let's Play programme.  This Tuesday will be the second teleclass of the program, and I have been working on my accompanying worksheets.

The first set had me start with imagining my dream life -- not so hard to do, it involved things like writing and living near the sea and working from home.  I came a little unstuck around having to come up with a kind of project the first week -- I just drew a blank.  Like with Screw Work, Let's Play and the book's "Play Wednesdays", it should be something that's fun to do and you enjoy and would ideally form a part of your ideal life.  It's pretty sad when you can't think of anything.

To try and make some progress, and because it comes highly recommended by Ms Cantwell and John Williams, I took the Wealth Dynamics test.  I voiced some reservations at first.  In some ways it isn't too dissimilar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator -- that I took last year when I was out of work, and has no scientific validity its profiling.  While I wasn't assured of any kind of scientific validity to it, I was told that it would help with supporting me on the course if I did know what my WD profile is.

I wasn't exactly surprised when -- $100 later -- of the 8 personality profiles, I turned up the "creator".  I'd read that most people guess their profiles wrong before they take the test, but I would have been very surprised had mine turned up anything other than that.  Recently at work we were giving interviewees psychometric tests, to rate their scores in various aspects, such as creativity and organisation.  I scored off the chart for creativity.

Considering I score so highly for creativity, I was a little disheartened that my muse was absent when I wanted to think of something to do.  I could think of my plans and free range career options, just not some little thing I could do for a taste of it.

Fortunately, today that has all changed.  I have worked through my worksheets for week 2, and was required to outline 3 or 4 ideas for my free range career.  My ideas were as follows:

1. Writing childrens books, in particular books about a naughty zebra who won't do things like have a bath or get ready for bed.  Why a zebra?  I just like them, and while I like things like Bongos and Zedonks more, they are a little obscure for childrens books.

2. An adventure sport company that benefits local communities.  It's an idea I have written on here about before, and it's a fairly simple concept.

3. Feature writer.  Essentially, I write about what I am passionate about.  In this case, I plan to talk to passionate and inspiring people and write about them.

I was then required to eventually narrow down my ideas to just one I am going to pursue for now.  It was hard. It was extremely bloody hard.  I wasn't worried so much about choosing the wrong thing, but I didn't want to not pursue something I was excited about.  In the end, I have decided that my third option gives me all of the elements I want most for my free range lifestyle, and can work other parts into it.

Starting immediately I am going to make contact with people I want to interview for my features.  Since I promised this year I would contact Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, they can be the start -- and my meeting now will be less "Can we have tea?" but more "I'd like to talk to you about your work".

I am excited and enthused to be starting on this -- the Zebra books can wait a little while.  I'm so excited I am ignoring that I have to go to work tomorrow, because this is really what my life is about...