12.14.2004 - 3:40 p.m.

For November I decided to write a poem every day. I have done week-long challenges of this kind before, with both poems and stories, but never for a whole month. And I did all right--nineteen actual poems and five more starts I couldn't quite pull together. Only six missed days. In December I decided to do it again, or at least, to write more poems than I did in November.

It is the fourteenth, and I have written exactly half a poem. I have obviously reached that stage that happens in diets and semesters and bill-paying where I have made a concerted effort to do well, but hubris at my accomplishment has reached the point where I quit working to maintain the improvement.

I hate when I do that. So I am thinking of changing the rules, of changing my resolution to showing up at the gym on a regular schedule, starting a savings account for my Master's, or flossing every day. As long as I'm working on something, it counts, right?

Anyway there are so many things I should do every week, writing (poems and stories and, uh, diary entries) and cleaning the apartment and finding a grad school and exercising and cooking, if I kept to the proper schedule for all of them, all the time, when would I do anything else? When would I talk to anybody?

In any case, I really have improved. I used to refuse to call myself a writer because I thought I couldn't do it well enough. Now it is just that I can't stick to it.

Go me.

-stonebridge

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