Today is Groundhog Day or as I used to call it in my past Engineroom Lower Level Day. Today, the midwatch engineroom lower level watchstander climbs out of his hole to the top of his latter. If he sees his shadow the crew is doomed to stay at sea another six weeks.
Or maybe not.
It is also, thanks to David Seah, the day I make resolutions. It is a better day for such things than New Year’s Day.
I will post on the double days (3/3, 4/4) for the rest of the year with a final evaluation on 12/12. That provides 313 days to achieve these goals (today through 12/11).
So, for 2018 I resolve to:
- Start the Bradbury Reading Challenge: During his Evening with Ray Bradbury at Point Loma Nazarene University Mr. Bradbury made two challenges to aspiring authors. The first was a challenge to read one poem, one essay, and one story every day for a thousand days. I started on January 17 and have only missed two days this week. On those two days I died due to bad planning in that I read a story and an essay and didn’t get to my poem. Given right now I’m reading a selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets there is not much of an excuse.I will mark progress by publishing a list of reading since the prior month on my updates. My goal is 297 days of progress representing a 95% reading rate.
- Do a Modified Bradbury Writing Challenge: In the above talk Mr. Bradbury also encourages writers to do a 52 in 52 story writing challenge. He argues no one can write a bad story 52 times in a row.I am hoping that is true of 44 stories. I start my weeks on a Sunday and thus I need to have a story every Saturday. I am excluding tomorrow and only counting Saturdays with a full week before them in the goal period. There are 44 of those.I will mark progress by publishing a title and word count on the blog every Saturday if a story is finished and an admission that I did not finish a story. The goal is 42 stories for a 95% success rate. If a story I write in the period gets bought I will count it as 9, one for what it is and 8 for the number short of 52 I had to write in order to write a salable story.
- I will run a 5K. This is step one of a larger plan but for now I will keep it under wraps. I will measure progress by posting how much running I did the prior period, which 5K I choose, and what my time was when I run it. Success is completing one 5K with a mile pace that would pass the Navy PRT requirements for my age.
That is it. I am not sure if that is not much or if that is too much. We will reflect on that on March 3.
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