1000 Days

Jeremiah Hardsock pulled his nearly dead brother, Wendell Christopher Hardsock, through the chill marsh waters.  Jeremiah hoped the cold would slow WC’s bleeding.  He repeated a single thought over and over and end to end: this has got to be faster.  He no longer felt certain.

The broadly fletched arrow poking straight out of WC’s chest caught Jeremiah’s attention again.  He thanked God that WC was in such good health–he’d make it for sure–and prayed that leaving the shaft unbroken wouldn’t work against him.  The air turned cold overnight making his hands too numb to snap the arrow shorter without worrying the wound.  Between a puddle of more blood and leaving the shaft intact he’d chosen to leave it alone.  Thankfully WC wore his capote and slid through the knee-deep water and wet grass easily on the strong woolen coat.  Jeremiah had only needed to loop WC’s possibles bag under his arms and bind his arms with a leather thong. [too much logistics].  The water lagged the temperature drop; the deeper spots even warmer.   Strips of fog tore away from the marsh.

Word count: 186

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The nature of this bloggish incarnation of my daily writing doesn’t allow me to write anything prior to the day I post it.  Which leaves me little time for editing or pruning of my efforts.  Not that I would have been preparing this 100th day long in advance.  Let me tell you what I have been thinking but not writing.  This day is monumental for me.  It marks not only an extended dedication to daily writing, but also several new learning experiences.

I have written before in spurts.  A few pages one week, some polishing of those the next, and maybe one or two new pages the third week.  Those undisciplined forays produced three, maybe four, valuable pieces of pieces of writing.  I sat down with the purpose to write, but irregularly.  I never expected to complete anything of significance and I never required myself to produce new content before leaving the keyboard.  If there was a distraction it was invariably attended to first.  Then I often didn’t return to the writing at hand–for days.

Surprisingly, this worked out well at the time.  I joined a local writing group that met twice a month.  We had just enough members and just enough time between submissions for me to crank out a few more labored efforts with out seeming to lag the remainder of the group too much.  This approach engendered in me the much needed ability to accept criticism on my writing without straining my low volume output too much.  It felt good to be in that place.  Then work intruded, my output became excuses, then vapor, then finally non-attendance.

That I have written daily for the past hundred days marks my acquisition of a necessary behavior.

Enduring dedication to the habit of writing spawns an awareness that leads to increased quality.  Writing daily is hard to do without inadvertently desiring to do it better each day.  Or at least better again the next day.  The two things I feel I have most come to recognize and correct are passive voice and nominalization.

I will not claim to have eradicated all passive voice.  I identify the act more quickly and stamp it out while writing the sentence rather than afterward.  Without making corrections mid-sentence I would doom myself to never making corrections at all.  Going back over stuff, editing, should move up on my list in the next hundred block.

Describing my understanding of nominalization requires that I know exactly what nominalization means.  I don’t know–not exactly.  The term is the act of turning a verb into a noun: ‘let’s do an assessment on Bob’ rather than ‘let’s assess Bob’.  Thus far nominalizing intertwines with passivity.  Removing the later tends to avoid the former.  I remain alert.

More comes next.

If writing the little bit I have each day in the last hundred days increased my awareness and skill this much, then writing a little bit more each day the next hundred will do the same, but more.  Along with my current vigilance I hope to better my grammar, particularly splicing commas and punctuating dialogue.

Word count: 508

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I’ve just noticed that the 100th day of writing here on 1000 Days will coincide with the my and my wife’s 10th anniversary.  This was not planned or foreseen–not till today anyway.

I’m inclined to derive some meaning from this concurrence.  I began writing at 1000 Days in a fairly random way.  I’ve failed to write a couple days and and scheduled a couple outages.  One hundred days isn’t exactly a easy duration to apply to a calendar to find a finish line from a start date.  All this is to say that I didn’t and probably couldn’t have planned to have done this on purpose.  It must be fate.  The trouble is I am at a loss for what meaning it could provide.

My wife and I don’t both write.  She’s not encouraging me to quit my day job to go pro (nor am I).  She doesn’t even read this site.  That leaves me to side  with my unromantic mathematical friend that this coincidence contains no meaning.  I won’t go so far as to fell it foolish to even think that it should; he can go there on his own.

I should spend the time instead getting a card or drawing a picture or writing a poem.

Word count:  206

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