100 Words - 100 Days -

Every year my TARA chapter does this Book Challenge. You sign up for in January (through March) and it cost $10.00.

We check in each week through our loop with the pages we’ve written for the past week. Checking in is a must. Even if you have no pages to report. Of course being the TARA sisters that we are you receive congrats on pages written and encouragement for those who have not written that week.

The premise is you will finish your book before the annual Christmas party in December. At that time you’ll bring the book, yes it must be printed out and brought to the party. For everyone who has signed up for the challenge and brings their book they will receive a ticket and the at the end of the party one ticket is drawn. The winner receives half of the money that was required to join the challenge.

I love it. It gives you that motivation needed to write when life gets you bogged down. At least it does for me. Okay it does for several months and then I find that it’s easy to let other things get in the way.

So what do writers do when things start to bog down? We add a new twist. Don’t all writers want new twist? Of course we do. It’s what moves things along for us.

We started the 100 words in 100 days. This means to write at least 100 words everyday for 100 days. I Love This!!!

One hundred words are extremely easy to do. It takes maybe a half a page to get your word count in. However, what I’ve found is once you start typing those 100 words more seem to flow. This is probably due to the fact that I’m not feeling pressured to write x-amount of pages.

I tried to find out who stared this since I know other chapters and writers have used this method and this is what I found.

The first person that google shows to have done this was Jeff Koyen who began this back in 2001.

At any rate I’m not sure which romance author actually started the challenge. I googled and while I found quiet a few who blog on it I couldn’t find where it started in the romance world. If you know add it in the comment section. It’s that enquiring minds want to know thing.

What I do know is this. It works. I’m on day 7. As of yesterday (day six I’ve added over 3000 words.) Of course I would love to say it was a much higher word count but the thing is I’m writing everyday. That’s the most important thing about this new challenge.

Writing Everyday. It becomes a habit. You have to sit down a write. You want to sit down and write. I know Kelly R. this goes right along with the 15 minutes a day. And like I said on our loop, you told me to do this months and months ago.

Oh wait…you thought all writers had to write everyday? That it was something they just had to do. Their fingers itched to play on the keyboard watching the words fly across the screen? Not so much. We are no different than anyone else in any other field. We hit roadblocks, our minds go blank, and yes, sometimes we just don’t feel like it.

So I’ve rambled on enough about this. To sum it up this is a great way to keep your writing going. Really all of us can write 100 words a day. If you’re not doing this then jump on the wagon and write along for the ride. I promise you’ll be happy when we reach the end of the road.

I’ll report on Mondays how I’m doing. Feel free to do the same. So for this week I’ve added a 3482. That doesn’t include writing the blog.

If you’re doing this on your own or through your local chapter tell me how it’s working or not working for you. Let’s keep each other motivated.