Dateline: Special New Year’s Edition 1-1-2018

First off, HAPPY NEW YEAR’S everybody!!! It’s been a crazy year that I’m glad is finally over and done with, then again, aside from the news and world events this year wasn’t all bad when it came to the personal projects that promoted emotional healing. In fact, apart from the world issues, this might have been the best year that I’ve had in quite some time.

It was exactly one year ago when I was down in the dumps to the point where I was contemplating giving up on writing altogether. I had already given up on screenwriting, and as for this blog, it had devolved to where I dropped the challenges and was merely writing my Daily Breaker posts which were usually pathetic ramblings about my life while trying to figure out what I wanted to do.

The problem was that I was too busy working on backup plans for if I were to never make it as a writer who can support himself, instead of working on the primary plan which is the only thing that keeps me from feeling miserable. This is why I decided to bring back the WickerBreaker challenges, starting with the goal to watch every single episode of Saturday Night Live that has ever been made.

Not only did this challenge give me something to write about on a daily basis, but it also gave me an excuse to start out each day with a healthy dose of comedy. If this combination wasn’t enough to lighten my mood, about halfway through the year, I felt like I was back to being enough of myself again to where I decided to venture back into the world of fictional writing by rewriting my very first novel that I had already adapted from a screenplay.

This rewriting process was pretty encouraging, not only did I still like I what I wrote close to half a decade ago, but I could see a vast improvement in my non-screenwriting style thanks to all of the practice that I’ve done through this blog. Sure, I still jumble my words and miss a lot of my typos but as far as the prose goes, I feel like I’ve made a significant leap since I’m now allowed to play with my words while ignoring the golden rule of screenwriting that strictly allows you only to write what you see.

With this newfound sense of enthusiasm, I decided to start a couple more challenges in the coming year to go along with the second half of the SNL Challenge that’s now such a routine that I’m not all that worried about any time demands.

With that here’s the game plan for next year.

Seeso Many Saturday Nights – As I said, I plan to continue with my SNL Challenge since I’ve already worked on it for an entire year and haven’t even made it to the midpoint quite yet but I am having a blast with my efforts.

Operation Achieve Anything – This is the challenge that I plan to combine with my Daily Breaker post where I will be following a daily map to success that’s been laid out in the book Achieve Anything In Just One Year. Though I have yet to open the book, since I want to keep it a day-one surprise, I have no idea what it has to offer other than daily tips that you're supposed to follow to meet your year-long goal.

With this being a daily challenge where I will be promoting my progress I figured merging it with The Daily Breaker would work better than starting something brand new since half the time I struggle to come up with anything to write only to end up rambling or writing about my dreams. Even though I’m clueless to the steps, I’m fully aware of the ultimate end of the year goal which is to get my novel to a point where it looks professional enough to self-publish.

The Self-Publishing Project – This might start out as a bit of a passive project where I will share the beta draft of my first novel, Chuck Norris Would Never Write This Book: A Diary Of Undiagnosed Disorders: Part One.  My hopes are that a handful of readers will like it enough to volunteer their talents to help me polish it to a publishable point as if I were crowdsourcing skills instead of funds.

This project will also be tied to Operation Achieve Anything, and as I said, I have yet to even open the book involved so this part of the process is still a mystery. This is another reason why I think this challenge will have a passive start since I’m sure, the first couple weeks will be devoted to easing the reader into the process, so this might be a set it and forget it challenge for a while.

Either way, I’ll figure out how to promote my progress from time to time, but until then it’s now time to say Happy New Year’s once again and that I hope you had fun with your night.

Talk to you tomorrow when I will be passed this explanation phase and ready to start this off.

Cheers,

The Wicker Breaker