On Devotion and Mastery · 6:05pm Oct 3rd, 2015
As of this moment, I am five minutes short of having spent 65 hours on writing during this calendar year. That sounds like a lot--that's more than two and a half entire days out of the year--but it really isn't. 275 full days of 2015 are gone. They've already passed. That represents 6600 (extra hours from today cut off for the sake of rounder numbers), which means I have spent just under one percent of my time writing. And that's after I just started writing a few hundred words every day for the last week and a half, adding a little over five hours to that total. That's simply unacceptable, considering that I want to be a professional writer someday.
They say that it takes 10,000 hours to master your craft, whatever it is. Plenty of research backs up this claim. And sure, I don't have to reach that point (a TEDTalk I watched recently pointed to a study suggesting that it only takes 20 hours to learn a craft, and the rest is simply taking small steps to improve). But I still have stories to tell, whether in pony or in original fiction, and I want to tell them as effectively as I can. At my current pace, I can never achieve mastery unless I live for twice the human lifespan. Even crediting myself with a hundred hours of previous writing experience (probably about right, given that I sometimes wrote stories as a kid and I also worked on a crappy novel before joining the site) and stretching my rate of writing out to a full year, it would still take me about 114 years to achieve mastery. I've got to step it up.
So as a way to push myself, I am guaranteeing you all at least one chapter's worth of content for the next four weeks. It might be a Thirty Minute Ponies story, or it could be a oneshot, or it could be publishing one of the chaptered TwiPie ideas I've had sitting around, or it could be something unforeseeable at this particular moment, but I will have something published by each Saturday. I'd probably go further, but NaNo's coming up and I will almost certainly be taking a break from writing ponies for that month. I just need to get myself writing more and actually getting things to a point where they're ready for others to look them over.
So look forward to that. Oh, and probably something Twenty One Pilots related, since that's pretty much half of what I've been listening to lately and I only love their music more with each listen.
