Life, assumptions, and everything

Pardon the poor take-off on the title of one of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, please. I was staring at the text box for entering a title, starting to get writer's block, and it hit me so I went with it.

I had planned to write here more often. But, it seems that when I get a few minutes to post I shy away, thinking I need to have some great thought formed that I can dig into here on the blog. Though that would surely be nice to have, it is not a requirement. I need to remind myself that to learn to write I MUST WRITE. Even if I don't have much to say. Isn't that one of the points of the first million words?

In the eighth grade I had an English teacher that made us write in our journals every day. Several of us complained often that we had nothing to write about. Her response was always that it didn't matter if we had anything to write about - we just needed to write. She actually made us write sentence after sentence of "I have nothing to write about today." Oddly enough, that was fairly successful in making me think of things to write about. I guess I need some sort of "getting started" trick like that, but less annoying to the reader, to help me write here.

Welcome to The First Million Words

Lately, I've often thought about what it takes to become a writer. I've read many things about it, and they basically all say the same thing - that for one to become a writer, one must write. Several articles even mentioned that you should consider your first million words as written to be thrown away. Write them and get them out of the way. Then you can start to have some hope that what you are writing might be meaningful to someone, somewhere.

On that note, this blog will be my first million words. Let's hope it's occasionally tolerable.