Did you decide to do NaNoWriMo this year? Great! In participating you joined a long line of talented writers who have found fellowship, support, and success in this yearly challenge. But you might not have been as good as you should have been. Maybe life just knocked you for a loop. Maybe you got writer’s block and had a hard time getting around it. Maybe you spent an entire weekend watching True Crime YouTube Videos and suddenly found yourself 3,000 words behind. Whatever your issue, NaNoWriMo can quickly turn from a joy to a struggle. And as the days tick…
Over the course of the month of October, I participated in my 30 Day Livestream Writing Challenge. There were some ups, some downs, and a lot of small emergencies that came up in the middle of the night with no warning whatsoever. But like every challenge I’ve done so far – whether it’s the Stephen King Writing Challenge or the 5AM Writer’s Club Challenge – I learned something from my 30 days in the trenches. Lesson One: Make sure your desk is optimized. In the beginning, all I thought I needed for this challenge was a riser for my laptop…
So let’s talk about writing challenges… My first challenge consisted of the participant getting up really early and writing for an hour. My next challenge upped the ante by forcing the participant to live three important beats of a famous writer’s schedule everyday. Challenge one had a decent response. Challenge two allowed me to make serious connections with amazing writers, got me a ton of exposure, and helped me finish multiple writing projects. Lesson learned: upping the ante works. So clearly I had to do it again. But I had to be responsible. The Stephen King Writing Challenge only had…
Since the Stephen King Writing Challenge went so well, I came up with two new challenges. One simple, one brutal. Without giving any details, I asked my followers on Twitter and Instagram to vote on what they’d like to see me do. Twitter Results The Twitter poll was pretty clear cut. People want me to not kill myself with an insane challenge that will destroy me emotionally for months. Well, that’s no fun. Instagram Results I realized half way through creating the poll that I had never created a poll for Instagram. For years, every piece of marketing research I…