Hello! I've just completed the 10,000 Word Challenge. This means that I've spent half the day sitting at my computer, pouring my mind into the Google Documents' hard-drive, and have arrived at a grand total of over 10,000 words.

I started yesterday at 2am, when I couldn't go to sleep for all the content that was floating around in my mind. I've just started this blog, and I needed to update some posts for it, so I decided that I need to spend at least one full day writing out all the ideas I had for posts. To be honest, I thought 10,000 words would be a lot easier than it was; I've never really had writers block before, because I'd always just stop when I have nothing to write, and continue again when I did. It helps that I can formulate new content in my mind pretty quickly, so I'm rarely without something to say - hence the new personal blog. But this time I really did get stuck in a few places. Topics dried out, my fingers went numb, I got tired, I got hungry, and I procrastinated - very human things. But in the end I pulled through, and I was able to learn a lot more about how I write and why I write than I have in a long time. I attribute this to pushing through periods where I usually would have given up.

When all is said and done, I look back on today and struggle to see why I don't write this much more often. I woke up, had breakfast, wrote a little, spoke to some friends, came back to my room, spent time messing about on twitter, wrote a bit, had lunch, exercised pretty decently, wrote a bit, watched a film, did some other work, read some books, and finished at exactly 3am. So no big deal; I could do this and keep a day job. The problem is only thinking of new things to write about, which isn't such a problem except for that for any topic you start writing about, you might want to finish writing about it that day. My experience with that is agonising, because whenever you have deadlines for content you're not fully immersed in at the time it takes a lot to keep the fingers rolling on.

In my introduction I said that I would either advise this challenge to other writers or not. I must say that I haven't quite decided yet, though you should know that I will definitely be encouraging some of my friends (many of whom are writers themselves) to take the challenge. It depends largely on your writing style. Some people work well when pushed by dealines and challenges like these, while others prefer a laissez-faire style where they write small chucks of content every day or so. I would say that it's best to be familiar with both ways, and find out which makes you more productive. For me, I will most definitely be partaking in more writing challenges - hopefully increasing the amount of words considerably now that I know what is possible.

I hope to get my new content out soon after editing,

PyThoughts