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.