I have to admit, learning how to operate this new blog is certainly a challenge! Learning how to use or do new things is not high on my list of favorite things (I don’t remember Julie Andrews singing about learning new things in The Sound of Music, do you?).
It is a natural fear though, if you stop and think about it. We all get in a comfort zone and we don’t like to stick our heads out of our shells to see what else is out there. Doing NaNoWriMo this month helped me break that fear a bit. I could not imagine writing 50,000 words in 30 days when I signed up in mid-October. Quite frankly, it sounded like total insanity to me. For two weeks, I questioned my sanity. Other people didn’t; they said I was already nuts, so doing something like this challenge seemed quite a normal thing for me to do.
As I started the challenge, I threw myself into it wholeheartedly. The more I worked, the more I realized I enjoyed writing with abandon, just letting the words flow without worrying about what I was writing. I believe one of the reasons I have not been more successful in my writing endeavors is because I always worry about the quality of what I am writing. NaNo helped me break through that wall. Now I have almost 57k and a good start for a book. I do not intend to let it fall by the wayside. But I wouldn’t have gotten this far if I hadn’t decided to crawl out of my shell and take a chance.
Opportunities come our way every single day. How many do you let go by because you are comfortable with the way your life is? Remember that list of New Year’s resolutions? Well, you’ve got a month left to get up off your buns and do them! Take a chance, try something new. You could be missing something.
Author Teresa Watson 