Another One Bites the Dust

Woo hoo!

So, today is the big day! 51 weeks ago I let my challenge madness take control and I issued myself a wee crazy 4 part challenge which included writing one post a week, finishing my screenplay, drawing once a week and drawing/writing with my feet every day.

Of course, things happened and this challenge fell by the wayside, and in typical me fashion I picked the ball up late in the 3rd quarter and tried to make a mad dash to the end. Did I make it? Well…sorta!

Here’s the breakdown:

Posting once a week – Did it! This was originally write a post a week for a year, but of course, after only 14 posts I stopped, and when I jumped back in, it became 38 posts 12 weeks, or about one every 3 days. Well, again, I didn’t do this and by June first I had to do 19 posts in the next 24 days. This was hard, as I’ve never done a post a day before, but I’m happy to say I did it! And set a personal record of 19 posts in one month. Woot!!

Drawing once a week – Didn’t do it. What I learned here is that I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and since I am so sorely out of practice, drawing was taking a lot of time. I still did some though, so I’m happy that I was able to start back into it. I’ll definitely be doing more of this, but at a leisurely pace.

The screenplay – Well, as most of major works in progress (of which I have several that have fell to the wayside have been percolating over the years) I was able to start strong, make it to the middle, and then got wrapped up in editing and started to lose my mojo. But mojo or nojo this baby is getting finished. That’s all there is to it, just not by the original deadline.

The drawing/writing with my feet – This was kind of a fun idea that involved trying to get some more range of motion in my feet and to stimulate the old grey matter into making some new neural pathways for a strange new activity. I settled into doing the date, the alphabet and two small characters such as clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades and stars daily with both feet. I did miss some days over that last 12 week push (I flubbed the year thing) but not that many, and I learned some pretty interesting things. One, if you want to write like you are in kindergarten again, try this. My motor skills were way off and trying to do a straight line could sometimes be a challenge, as was curvy things like Q and O. The placement of the pencil between your toes was really key, and I found I had to play with this a bit to figure out what worked best. Cramping feet was sometimes a problem, due to the toes gripping the pencil, and sometimes you can actually feel the small muscles higher in your leg that were attached to your feet twitching a bit after being used this way. If I did it before bed, I could sometimes see the effects of being tired in more random jerky motions, but overall, both improved dramatically. It also strangely manages to look a lot like my regular hand lettering which is a weird thing to see with your feet! I’m fairly confident if I was taken hostage with bare feet and had paper and writing implements nearby, I could write an awesome note to save the day. Or for the hostage takers entertainment. Whichever.

The result – 50/50 baby! Yup, again!

So what’s next? Hmmm…I think I have to think about this one a bit. I’m going to shoot for a minimum of one post a week, but I think I’d really like to get that screenplay done pronto. It would just be really nice to start out with a finished first draft. So, I’m going to do a mini challenge! I would like my first draft of the screenplay to be done by August 1st! So, I guess, here we go again! I’ll make sure to post weekly updates as we count down to the end date and this time it’s do or die! No 50/50 allowed!

Whew, so I guess that’s a wrap! Thanks for reading along so far! Time for bed!

~Liv