Fandom Snowflake 2022: Challenge #2

[scrubjayspeaks]

Challenge #2: In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

Well, last year, I challenged myself to take a picture every day. And you know, I never missed a single day. It's now just one of the things I do daily. I won't say I do it without thinking--there have definitely come a few evenings when I realized I needed to take one and just snapped a quick shot of my dog sleeping--but it feels natural now. And I realized what I really like is having that record of things I saw and did. I don't really care if I never make art this way, if they're mostly not shots anyone else would care to look at. It makes me happy to go back and say, oh, yes, it took until this day for the corn to be taller than me. It makes me happy to have so many pictures of my animals, most of whom are getting quite old.

In March, I took up a daily practice of Japanese to build back some of the meager skills I had from college. Haven't missed that, either. Don't know if I'm any good yet, but I'm keeping at it.

I already set a goal for myself in December to do a daily one-card pull from my tarot deck. Daily habits, things that take maybe five minutes of time, seem to be a winning strategy for me.

I've been wanting to set a daily writing goal for myself along these same lines. (I don't work on Lake Lewisia every day, though I do write for it every week.) I just can't decide what I want that goal to be. It feels like something dreadful will happen if I set the wrong goal. I'll burn myself out, or get frustrated, or just waste my time writing rubbish.

I've been thinking about Terry Pratchett's 400-word approach. He had a day job back then too, and a family, and he wrote every day because that was the thing he decided he would do. I'd like to do that. But as soon as I think that, my mind throws out all sorts of objections, all sorts of what-abouts, all sorts of reasons why I can't possibly commit to that.

Hm. Well, to satisfy my own curiosity, I just checked to see how much 400 words really is. It's...four Lewisia pieces, on average. Of course, like poetry, writing a three-line story takes a lot longer than writing three sentences in general, but that just drives the point home a bit more. 400 words, huh? Of whatever fiction I fancy working on at the time?

That...sort of sounds like a doable goal, doesn't it?

Oh, blast, I think I've convinced myself.

Comments

[razielim]

Sounds absolutely doable! It might not be a five-minute task like a card pull or snapping a photo, but it's definitely something that can find a home in most schedules and will be rewarding to look back on!

[scrubjayspeaks]

Thank you for the vote of confidence. Here's hoping.

[turps]

I agree, that does sound like a doable goal.

I hope you enjoy those words of fiction and writing becomes as much as a habit as taking photos and one-card pull.

[scrubjayspeaks]

Thank you! Building tiny, deliberate habits has been very satisfying so far.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Well, last year, I challenged myself to take a picture every day. And you know, I never missed a single day. <<

Go you! I'm lucky if I can remember to post the ones I take, so that's a goal for me.

>> In March, I took up a daily practice of Japanese to build back some of the meager skills I had from college. <<

Check your DVDs. Japanese is fairly common as a foreign language track. Watching something you already know in a new language can help your brain connect concepts, and just listening to the spoken language A LOT helps your comprehension and accent.

Re: Thoughts

[scrubjayspeaks]

Go you! I'm lucky if I can remember to post the ones I take, so that's a goal for me.

I usually just use my Pandemic Garden Club post as a place to dump the best garden pictures each month. Most of the rest of it is just for personal viewing.

What I found really helped was switching to the tablet. With my dSLR, I have to hook up a cord to the computer, pull the files from the memory card to the hard drive, edit them to my liking, resize to make uploading easier (I use tumblr private posts as an easy photo hosting option), then add them to a post.

With the tablet, I can edit them in place, I don't need to resize, and I just go into the tumblr app to create a new draft post with whatever I want to share. This method takes out a lot of the inconvenience, which had been my main stumbling block for sharing pictures. The photos are lower quality than they would be on the dSLR, but since I'm just wanting to take snapshots to document things around me, it's good enough to be going on with.

Plus, I know exactly when in the month I'm going to want to post something and can plan toward that goal. If it was just a matter of deciding to share a photo whenever I happened to take a cool one? Yeah, no, wouldn't happen very often. Maybe you would have better luck remembering if you made it a recurring post that can be scheduled in?

Watching something you already know in a new language can help your brain connect concepts

Fortunately, I've been enough of a fan of anime over the years that I have a collection of DVDs suitable for this purpose. My next big challenge, though, is getting good enough at reading to make my way through my (much more limited) selection of untranslated manga. Oh, kanji, still the bane of my existence after all these years! At least it's kid's manga, so it has furigana next to all the characters already.