No Turquoise Horse For Me

At least not this month.

I’m surprisingly disappointed about this. I’ve been coveting the Turquoise Horse since I first discovered its existence. I wrote about it last month when I praised its home, 750words.com.

Wha?!

See, the Turquoise Horse is one of the silly little animal badges that you are awarded on 750words.com for achieving certain milestones. This particular one is for publicly entering a monthly challenge and then meeting it by writing at least 750 words every day for a calendar month.

I’ve signed up for a monthly challenge or two in the past, but have never been successful. But I was on such a streak of writing going in to June, I thought for sure I’d be able to accomplish the challenge this month.

And then I forgot.

That’s it, I just forgot.

I so cleanly forgot that I didn’t even realize I’d forgotten until I went to write my words today, and there were two blank green boxes at the top of the screen. There should have only been one.

I used my first two hundred words to rant about how I couldn’t believe I forgot. (Apparently is was a helluva rant, it earned today’s entry an NC-17 rating instead of my usual PG-13.)

The forgetting and blowing the streak for the month had me so disappointed, I actually considered throwing in the towel. But more importantly, I realized that I was letting this negate the things that I did achieve in my writing.

Yet, amazing things have happened.

And, they are not small things.

I hit a new streak of consecutive posts. I wrote 41 days in a row! FORTY ONE DAYS. That is a big deal. I haven’t ever done that before.

Even bigger than that? I earned The Flock badge. You earn The Flock by writing 100,000 words. ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND WORDS. That’s two NaNoWriMo novels worth of words.

And somewhat tangential to 750words, but totally related to writing, this post marks 41 posts in a row. That’s more than eight weeks! EIGHT WEEKS OF BLOGGING EVERY WEEKDAY. Also a very big deal, especially for someone who wasn’t sure she could really do the original one month blogging challenge.

Oh serendipity, how I love thee.

Since this is so important to me, it makes sense to put a system in place to ensure that it happens. Every. Single. Day.

Luckily, I had a lovely chat with my favorite systems maven Cairene this morning, and she told me about Sarah Bray’s 90-minute workday. I was salivating over it’s perfect-ness for me. And that was even before I knew I let yesterday’s writing slip through the cracks. There will now be a home for this, and other things I’m working on. I know how to change and grow my system so I’m curious to see how this will evolve for me.

But mostly I’m excited to start a new writing streak.