100 day project

100 Day Project – Halfway There

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Within the last fifty days, I shared with you my intention to begin and complete a one hundred day project following Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy. I’ve read her chapter introductions, and then each of the ten essays by various authors, absorbed their stories, dove into the prompts, and for the most part wrote for as long or as short a time that my essay needed.

Before I get into the weeds of this project and process, I would like to readily admit that I think I’ve succeeded in my non-stated goals. I am writing every day; not just these prompts, but working on my book, writing posts to publish on my website, taking notes for future writing projects.

Because the authors are so varied in their backgrounds, their writing styles, and the stories they choose to share, one thing that I’ve been doing is thinking and contemplating what I want to write about, how much of my personal experiences I want to share, and really concentrating on continuing to grow as a writer. I’m seeing that many of the prompts can be blended together, I can create multi-part essays and longer pieces, and there is a lot of inward looking. I can see going back again to some of the prompts and expanding what I’ve already written, starting the prompt anew, continuing or creating a chapter/monthly series on one or more of the prompts.

I do intend to share some of what I’ve written with the world.

Word counts are not the end all be all of writing. I could easily write over 1000 words a day, but is it worth reading? Not if it’s crap. Having said that, it’s still important to have touchstones to know where I am in the writing process. While the essays I’ve written with these prompts can be left as standalone pieces, some may be refashioned, edited, and of course, everything can be made better.

For the fifty days so far, I have written approximately 25,133 words, which amounts to 503 words per day. Some days there were a hundred words written, some seven hundred, and there were one or two days when over a thousand words were completed.

While the book gives you no special rules, and you decide what you want to get out of the project, I started with six simple suggestions that I fashioned for myself. They were to keep me on task, accountable, and focused.

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The Next 86 Days

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Fourteen days ago, I started a 100 Day Project. I had no intention when I was setting my goals for 2026 to do something like this. I can usually do about a week in a row, maybe, or one day a week for maybe two months, I will write everyday but I won’t stick with this type of commitment. I’m not sure why. I love to sit down in front of my computer or my Kindle. At the moment, I’ve just finished lunch at Cracker Barrel and this is the third thing I’ve written. I know that part of that is that I’ve started this 100 Day Project. It has really motivated me to write and to write more.

This is also a book rec. A couple of years ago, I read Suleika Jaouad’s memoir Between Two Kingdoms. I had heard of the book through an interview with Jon Batiste, Stephen Colbert’s former band leader, and I thought this book would be fun. The author had leukemia and went through treatment, and reading it was not fun. I am under no illusion that it wasn’t fun for her either. It was an emotional roller coaster. I felt it, obviously not the trauma and debilitating circumstances of cancer, but Suleika’s writing drew me in, and she will draw you in. I think the best writers keep you in suspense. As she told her story, knowing that she must have survived – she wrote the book, she got married – through the book, I still wondered if she was okay. That is the mark of a great writer.

When I saw this book on an email advert from Indigo Book store in Canada, I was intrigued. I recognized her name right away, and when I read the title (without the subtitle), I thought it was fiction. I learned very quickly that it wasn’t. It was a journey, one that I take myself on often but this was a nice guide to take me on that journey through other people’s thoughts, ideas, and inspirations. I borrowed the book from the e-library and started reading.

I have been reading for two weeks now, and the book is due. I gave myself ground rules, and I will share them with you, but there are no real rules until you make them for yourself. They have to work for you or else what’s the point?

In choosing to follow the guides in the book, I soon realized that it can be done in any medium. It is not restrictive to writing, even though that is my vocation. Even if the prompt directs you to write, you should do whatever feels creative to you. Again, for me that’s writing, but I also like to sketch and for one of the past fourteen prompts, there was a mind map activity. I made the mind map. I could have easily listed the items, but the mind map is a visual way of writing. I’ve done that before (and taught them to other writers by the name word webs). There was a ten image prompt that could easily be done with a camera or a sketchbook. I wrote a vignette for ten images in my life, which was very much like a writing prompt i received from my regular writing group about choosing five nouns and writing about them.

If you’re the kind of reader looking for the numbers, I have written every day using the prompts in this book for a total of 6730 words.

That’s an average of about 480 words a day. Not great, but also 480 more a day than I would have done otherwise.

I am still keeping up on my blog writing, on my book writing, on my writing groups prompts, and my work writing.

My rules are simple.

  1. No looking ahead.
  2. Read each section of the chapter on the day.
  3. Once I read that day’s essay and prompt, I usually copy/paste the prompt onto a new document. Each day is saved as Day #, so at the end of one hundred days I will have one hundred documents.
  4. I decided that I would do this entire project on my kindle. No going back and forth to journals or paper and not on my computer. One thing that ensures is that I can always do it – my kindle is always with me.
  5. Then I write. My rule about the writing is that I do not wait until later. If I don’t have time to write, then I don’t read the essay. I read the essay, the prompt, and I write on the prompt. Then I keep writing until I’m done. It’s different each day. Some days are 250 words, and some are over 700. I don’t do the word count until I’m finished.
  6. I do a spell check before I save the document.
  7. I haven’t gone back to re-read, but that’s not so much a rule as something I’ve simply not done. I know that some of these will be revisited and used as the basis for  longer writing.

I haven’t decided if I’ll share any of the writing, perhaps in a few more days.

Now that my library loan has expired, I wasted no time in buying my own copy of The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life by Suleika Jaouod. I didn’t want to miss any of the days and I wanted to keep to the 100 days in a row.

If anyone’s interested in joining me on this project, let me know.

Perhaps there’s some way we can work on this together. I’m open to ideas and suggestions.