Whilst frantically searching for answers as to where, oh where my Google account had gone (which has since been found, by the way), I happened across Matt Cutts’s website. Matt Cutts is a software engineer at Google, hence the reason for landing on his website. What I saw there, among other things, was a little category called “30 Days”. I knew right away what it was and kicked myself for not having a similar category on my site.

I’ve been doing 30 day challenges for eons now. It all started with a little plan I devised called “The okTober Project”, which is just a fancy name for a 30 day challenge that took place in October –I was pretty dramatic back then. I can’t remember all the specifics, but the list of items I had to accomplish in 30 days was mind-numbing. Over the years, the oKtober Project spread into other months. I also stopped overloading myself with an obscene amount of objectives and settled on just a few, well thought out goals per challenge. I’ve taken it one step further recently, limiting myself to one goal per 30 day challenge. This way I can focus and not get too overwhelmed.

The first challenge making its debut in my shiny new 30 Day category, will be to write 750 words per day, everyday, for 30 days. I won’t lie to you, I’m slightly terrified. I got the idea from a great website called, believe it or not, 750words.com. Here’s what the creator of that site has to say:

I’ve long been inspired by an idea I first learned about in The Artist’s Way called morning pages. Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in “long hand”, typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It’s about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day.

So it begins. From September 1st, which happens to be today, to September 30th, I shall write –and I shall write hard! It won’t be pretty, I won’t win any awards, I might even cry a little, but I shall prevail. There’s little to no chance that anyone will see what I write, so don’t ask (how Salinger of me). I’ll post progress updates to my twitter account from time to time. When the challenge is over, I will post a full recount of my 30 days and hopefully I will be 22,500 words the richer, but until that day….I write!

“Call me Ishmael” –wait, has that been used already?