A Writing Challenge I Didn't Refuse

I love when inspiration hits.  It doesn't matter how it comes about, just so long as it does.

That is what happened to me last week.

While watching TV, writing an update for my blog and watching the happenings on twitter I completely missed a writing challenge.  I am not sure who issued the challenge on this date but after I stumbled across it and did some research I found myself directed to a blog update by @Patrick_Alan (if you are not following him on twitter, go and follow him now) who had originally issued this twitter challenge awhile ago.

I decided on Friday I needed to sit down and give this 1k1h a try.  The rules are simple, and you can find them here.  

When I sat down to begin, I turned on some music, booted up the computer, announced my intention on twitter and set the timer.  I was very motivated.  Mainly because I wanted to be able to go back and announce that I had hit the 1000 words in an hour.  I was not competing against anyone but myself and for some reason this accountability factor had me fired up.  I needed to know I could meet this challenge.  It was vanity pure and simple.

Once I logged out of twitter, in order to stay focused, I opened my latest work in progress and the words were just there.  I didn't have to search for them.  I didn't have to wonder what would come next.  I knew.  It was just all right there.  The fingers had magic in them as they flew across the keyboard.  Sometimes they slowed so I could smell the roses and other times they moved so rapidly, I would have easily taken the pole if it were a NASCAR qualification race.  

Now you should know.  I love to write.  I live to write.  Writing is how I spend my evenings.  I shoot for 500 words a day.  Sometimes I hit and sometimes I miss.  But I don't force myself to write everyday.  I don't even hold myself accountable if I miss on the word count.  But after this challenge it made me rethink how I approach my writing.

On Friday, I not only hit 1000 words, I did it in less than an hour.  By the one hour mark I was at 1500 words and by the time I looked up almost three hours had passed and I had 3500 new words to show for my self imposed challenge.  Did you get that?  Three thousand five hundred new words.  I know, I was pretty blown away by it too.

That was enough to cover my whole weeks worth of writing.  

After thinking about it I realized that accountability was the key here for me, my vanity didn't hurt either.  So at the end of the day what I learned was it doesn't matter where the inspiration comes from, just recognize it for what it is and hold on for the ride.