Edward Penfield Self-Portrait Poster Calendar 1897

If you like to write or draw or do certain types of journaling, I’m sure you’ve encountered 30-Day Challenges before.

The idea is to do something you want to do more often (or feel you need to do more often) every day for 30 days. There are usually checkboxes to mark your progress.

For some things, the hope is that doing the activity for that long will form a new habit. For others, you just want to be left with a collection of content, like daily sketches or microfiction.

The month of October is famous for having a lot of drawing prompts to get you through the month. And then there’s NaNoWriMo in November, where you’re left with a (usually very messy and hole-filled) first draft of a novel.

I both love and hate 30-Day Challenges. I love them in that they’re a good way to get myself to do something. But I hate them in that, with most of them, I have regret just a week in, but am stubborn enough to finish the challenge, hating it for the whole rest of the month.

It hasn’t been that way with NaNoWriMo, fortunately, but the stars don’t align every year for me to participate. This year, for example, I’m sure I’ll be working on (or finishing up!) my current book. So perhaps my 2023 NaNoWriMo efforts will be to just work on it every day for at least an hour. That’s not as fun as working on a brand new story, but new stories will have to wait for a future time.

Now I’m just going off on tangents. But I tend to do that, because everything is connected in my head. So, there you go.

As usual, if you want to support my efforts at this blog, please consider buying your Amazon purchases through this affiliate link where I receive some financial benefit. Or go right to the source and send me money through PayPal. No pressure, though.