Yesterday was the hundredth day of my 100-Day Project. That would presume that I have completed one hundred prompts. Well…

Overall, I’m really proud of what I’ve accomplished and would highly recommend Suleika Jaouad’s book, The Book Of Alchemy: A Creative Practice For an Inspired Life. The essays she wrote and the ones she shared range from the funny, tales of life to the poignant heartbreaking twists and turns of life. Some resonated and some did not as all things in life can do. Some prompts were more difficult than others. I don’t recall which one, but I believe there was one that I completely noped out of, and went in a different direction. I laughed, I cried, and each prompt made me think and feel and wonder.

Today, I am on prompt 94 so I am nearly done with the book and I have decided to take two days with these last ten. I want the book to continue on. Last weekend, I was on a writing retreat with my wonderful writing group, and so my concentration was on that writing and reading, plotting and planning. I felt no guilt at all. Once Monday arrived, I got back in the flow of Alchemy.

The most recent one was a prompt about enchanted places and what makes them enchanted. There’s more to it than that, but that’s what I took away. I set that one aside on Friday, and went to one of my enchanted places: The Kateri Shrine in Fonda, New York. I spent about an hour there walking around, photographing flowers and chapels, signs and statues, and yes, writing. There was one picnic table with benches there and I sat there with my kindle and my keyboard and got out just over nine hundred words. There will be edits and additions.

After about day twenty, I made a plan to return to the prompts, and that is my plan for the summer between writing my book and keeping my deadlines, publishing on my website, and perhaps a Substack or two.
When all one hundred are completed sometime in the next week or so, I will read the end pages of the book, the contributors notes and bios, and then I plan to go back to what I’ve written and add, edit, flesh out the ones that have somewhere else to go. After all, that is what being a writer is: writing, writing, writing.

For the most part, I wrote my responses to the prompts on the same day I read them. I kept track of the subjects, categories, and word counts, although sometimes I feel as though word counts are arbitrary. I am stretching these last few out, savoring them. Even though I plan to go back to the ones written since the beginning of the project, there is nothing like doing something for the first time.

On some I added thoughts and paragraphs to the writing. Sometimes, I included ideas that were floating around formlessly in my head. Each prompt had so much potential, and it really is a wonder how many different ideas and inspirations I could get from one prompt. It’s glorious to see what others come up with from the same prompt as well.

Tangentially related, in the memoir class I’ve been taking this season, a book was recommended to me that I’ve begun, and it has given me the framework for my next book once St. Kateri’s Shrines (not the actual title) is completed. I had been struggling with that subject and how to approach it for years, and so seeing this one random inspiration is a gift to myself.

And now, on to prompt #94!