Creating a space...

You see them all over the internet all of the time. Google the words "30 day"... plank challenge, ab challenge, bike to work challenge, shred, squats, sober, coffee free, refined sugar free, and on and on. Thirty days.  One solid month whose name occupies the line on the checkbook, the auto fill in Word, the mm in the mm-dd-yyyy.  Only thirty days. So I signed up for Hugo House 30 Minutes a Day Writing Challenge. Just 30 minutes. Each day.

I can do a lot of things for 30 minutes.  We call can.  It's not impossible. And that's the point.  It's to get you back into the habit of making time and space for your writing. For saying "this is my time to create".  And not doing anything else in that space and time.  These are the things I am not doing right now:

• washing the 37 dishes I used to make a very delicious dinner 
• getting our apartment tidied up my wifey's weekend visit
• painting in my "art journal" - which I'm learning about from my friend Connie's Dirty Footprint Studio
• perusing Facebook
• dusting off my Twitter
• finishing up Gulp by Mary Roach

If you read about any successful writer it's because they write daily.  Just like athletes, you have to train daily, read good books, practice writing engaging sentences and weaving together stories, introducing yourself to characters that may challenge you daily, stretching your tight little vocabulary in a robust beast worth flaunting, making a space in your clutter home, your distracted head and busy life for all of this.

Making a space, like this.