I finished reading the first part of Don Quixote, and a few hours later I received Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor and Runaway by Alice Munro. I’m going to take a break from reading the second part of Don Quixote and focus my energies on reading and learning from these two books of short stories. I’m excited. With all my focus geared toward improving my craft, I’m living a happier life.

I feel more creative. I have a few characters in my novel that I love writing, and I started writing them again yesterday, and everything I’m writing with them I love. They’re funny and tragic and they’re the heart to my story, so much so that I’m thinking of focusing on them a lot more in the second draft. I’m also nearing the end of my story, so everything’s converging toward the climax, and I’m having fun writing that. I’m supposed to be finished with this novel sometime next month, and that deadline both scares and excites me. It’s good to have a deadline, but that also means I need to start wrapping things up and getting ready for the rewrite. Can’t wait.

The main drama teacher is gone for the rest of the week, so I was able to take charge of the class and act on a few of the ideas I’ve wanted to play around with. Like fun improv activities. We played one called Freeze, where two students stand up and start acting a scene that I give them. Later, someone in the audience yells Freeze! and takes the place of one of the actors — pose and all — and continues the scene. I would then yell Stop! and give them a different prompt once things were slowing down. We had a lot of fun, but I noticed a lot of the same kids going up and doing all the work. We had to call on a few students to come up and start participating. They did well, but I would’ve liked them to be more active. That’s something I could work on later.

They start acting their Social Network scenes tomorrow, if we have complete groups available. Our school — and possibly our district or the whole state of Montana — thought it wise to schedule more of their track meets during school hours. I had most, if not all, of my track meets after school. They weren’t going to have us miss school because of an insignificant track meet. But I guess in Montana they feel the opposite. So many of our drama students are in track and so they’ll be gone tomorrow. If we have groups, we’ll go; if not, we’ll probably do more improv. Fine with me. Our next assignment has something to do with Fairy Tales, but we haven’t figured that out yet.

Pretty standard and habitual day, unfortunately. The more I simply read and write and workout and not do much else, the less material I have to work with to use in these entries. I may not make it a full year not for lack of discipline, but for lack of material, and to save my few readers the trouble of reading something very boring.

I’d rather read than write right now. Take that for what it’s worth.

As a reaction to yesterday’s entry, I read Don Quixote as much as I could, fitting in reading times during the little breaks of my day. I was able to get farther into the book than usual, and I’m really grateful for that because I’m really close to finishing the first part of this really good novel. Don Quixote, the book, is hilarious, and Don Quixote, the character, is amazing. He’s committed to becoming a great knight-errant, and he’s doing all he can to be one. How many of us can say that about anything in our lives?

Last year, I wrote a short story for the Sycamore Review Wabash Prize for Fiction. I thought the story I wrote was pretty good, but it was declined. I had to pay a submission fee to enter, which also paid for a year’s subscription to their literary journal. A few months ago they sent my first journal from my subscription, which I haven’t gone through, and today, I received my second journal. The first one didn’t have last year’s fiction prize winners, which is why I haven’t read through it yet, but the second journal does have last year’s short story winner and finalists, which I’m eager to read soon. These entries were considered good enough for publication, so there has to be something there that I can learn from.

Tomorrow I should get two more books containing short stories. A big reason why I read so much Don Quixote today was because I wanted to quickly start these two books. I don’t think I’ve ever tried reading two fiction books at the same time — other than the time in 2011 when I read a Shakespeare play a week along with whatever book I was reading — but I’m considering doing that and incorporating it into my routine somehow. I’m thinking of a morning reading and a nightly reading or something like that. I won’t know until I figure it out, naturally.

I also bought Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and the revised version of Getting Things Done a little over a week ago. I also want to get started on these books soon, plus I’m building a substantial list of fiction books I want to buy that will help me become a better reader, and in turn, a better writer.

I’ve never been so focused on one thing in my entire life. My goal is to be a better writer, and I’m trying everything I know how to be that. I don’t consider these entries a reflection of my skill and talent because I truly believe writing is rewriting, and I don’t do that with my blog entries. Instead, my blog is a place where I get to think aloud, and I think it’s been that since the beginning. It’s where I try to keep myself accountable, write out what I’m thinking, and document the progress I’m making as a writer and a human being. I used to feel so guilty that my entries weren’t that good, but I’m glad they weren’t. They shouldn’t have been.

What I need to do, and what I’m doing, is to focus on my literary fiction, whatever that means. That, again, means reading and writing as best as I can. Lets do this.

I want to tell stories. That’s essentially why I write. Whether they’re fictional or biographical, I like telling stories. I have to keep reminding myself about that because I’ve been feeling insecure about my writing recently, and if I really think about it, I’ve always felt insecure about my writing.

I feel like it doesn’t matter how much I write if it’s not a super focused activity. If I write habitually and, in a sense, mindlessly, then there’s no way I can improve. I can see it in my writing, and I can feel it when I read it. This is one area of my life where I have to be hard on myself. Writing chose me, and it’s something I have to do, but writers needs to be read. I need to be read. I have to be published, and I’m just not good enough yet.

As a response to my insecurity, I spent $25.93 on two books today, both of which are short story collections. I bought them because I need to improve my short stories. Hell, I have to write more short stories, and to be better, I have to read authors who write really good short stories.

I’m also rushing through my novel right now. I need to get through the first draft because then I feel that I will finally start writing. I’ve written 76,000 words, but that’s not a novel. It’s a couple hundred pages full of false starts and tangents I should never have taken. I need to refine my characters, tighten my plots, and improve my sentences. I need to keep revising it until everything flows and reads like a novel. I’m too far away from that right now, so again, I need to get through this first draft before I can start writing.

I think I need to rethink my daily routine. I do a lot of writing but not enough reading. I need to read more. I also need to write more fiction if I intend to improve it. I don’t know what this looks like yet. Part of me wants to cut my daily blog entries, but I made a promise to myself to write for a full year. I’m 147 entries away from that, including this one. I could always sleep less, but with all the Insanity I’m doing, that might not be a good idea. I’m also thinking about cutting back my workouts, but I need to workout my body, so I can’t cut that. What I’ve been thinking of doing is not writing 300 words every afternoon. Instead, I could spend that time either revising my novel or reading seriously. I’m not sure yet. Hell, I don’t know anything right now.

All I know is that I need to be a better reader and a better writer. I feel like this is an excuse, but there isn’t enough time in the day for me to do what I need to do. I feel crushed by the weight of my own ambition, and I don’t know what to do.

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” — Douglas Adams

I keep a journal where I write the thoughts and feelings I have about my novel. I’ve been beating myself up over the perceived lack of quality that I’ve been writing in my novel, like how bad I am, how I will never get into grad school because I suck, and how how I’m just wasting my time writing so much. When my writing’s not going well, my mood changes and I lash out at the only person who cares: me. I don’t know how much of what I’m berating myself about is actually true, but it hurts sometimes and motivates me to do better the other times. If I want to be a good writer, I have to do everything I can to make it happen, and I think this journal helps me get there, especially because I’m hard on myself.

Like with most of my paper journals, I limit myself to a page an entry. I do this because it gives me a goal to reach, and it makes it easier for me to peruse later. I’ve done this with most of my Moleskine journals, and since I’m writing this in the bigger Confidant notebook, I’m forced to write more. I date every page because I love knowing when I wrote something, and I number every page in every notebook I’ve ever owned because it makes it easier to reference other entries. Page numbers also provide a visual way to know how many more pages there are left in the notebook or how much I’ve written in it so far. I really like the blank pages of this notebook. Not being constrained by lines gives each page a unique look that I like, and seeing each line written straight as if on some line anyway gives me pride.

This journal didn’t start off so negatively. It held so much promise. I wrote down character sketches and ideas and outlines and anything I thought would help me write my novel better. As its function evolved into a personal journal, my thoughts turned more negatively. I demanded better from myself, so I decided to write another 300 words in the afternoon. My extra output has really helped me realize how quickly I need to write the first draft because that’s the only way I know how to discover the story I want to write about. I’m discovering my story with each scene I write, and that has meant I’ve written some very crappy scenes. It’s these crappy scenes I’m berating myself about. I shouldn’t because I know they’re crappy and I need them to be crappy so I can improve them during the rewrite.

I keep writing in my journal about how much I want to get to the rewrite already. I have ideas on how to make it better, and I want to write them. I also know, however, that I need to get to the end as quickly as possible because I’m afraid I’ll be stuck in rewrite mode forever and never finish the damn thing. I’m planning to finish this first draft within the next month, and even though I shouldn’t care how crappy it becomes, I will care. It’s going to be hard finishing it with this self-imposed deadline, but maybe that’s something I can write about in my journal.

Instead of berating myself over the lack of quality in my work, I could berate myself about meeting this deadline.

I spent the majority of the day watching Daredevil on Netflix, and it’s so good that I almost succumbed to my desire not to do any work today. That feeling was so strong and so familiar that it scared me a little bit. I hadn’t felt that in a long time, and I thought I grew stronger than that during this journey. I was wrong, and now I have to think about my discipline again. Truthfully, I really want to finish writing this entry so I can squeeze in one more episode of the show before I grow tired and fall asleep. I even switched things up a bit tonight and finished the rest of my nightly routine, leaving me with just this entry to write.

Part of me is glad that I gave myself the entire day to watch a very good television show. The other part of me, though, the part of me that knows I should be more focused and disciplined than that, isn’t glad. I should’ve read more, should’ve written more, and shouldn’t of eaten so much. I ate a lot today. I tend to eat a lot when I watch a lot of television, and that’s a big reason why I wanted to watch less TV. I’m still working out as hard as usual, and for the most part, I’m eating well, so I shouldn’t be that afraid of eating a few too many bagels one day out of the week. My mind might actually need it more than it thinks it does.

I’m almost done with my novel, but I think I finally cracked a few storylines that have been giving me issues since the beginning. I’m very ready for the rewrite because I know the changes I want to make, and I know what I need to do to make the whole story better. But I want to finish it first. I don’t want to go back and start over, in a sense. I need to keep moving forward until I reach the end. Then I can work on revising it.

I don’t know if I’m good enough to get into graduate school. I have my doubts, and unfortunately, my doubts are overcoming my other emotions. I know I have a fighting chance to get into a good school if I only tried, but my doubts are slowly convincing me that I shouldn’t even try. I don’t like feeling that way, but I also didn’t do any work today to overcome my doubts. Instead, I drowned myself in television and didn’t do much thinking about myself. I entered the world of Hell’s Kitchen and forgot about my own for a good eight hours.

This isn’t who I want to be, is it? I know how hard that sounds. I should let myself have some fun every now and then. I know that. But I’m also on a mission to spend as much of my time writing and reading and improving myself in all possible ways. Why do I feel so guilty for watching television? I shouldn’t be.

I am, though.

I wore my Green Lantern shirt at work today. I don’t have any pictures, unfortunately, but take my word for it: I looked good. I like it when I can wear jeans and a t-shirt at school, and I especially love it when I can wear it outside. The weather in Montana has been great recently, and even though most of the people I know in California would consider it cold, I consider it warm and amazing. I never realized how much weather affects my mood until this week when I felt the warm sun hit my skin and my mood quickly brighten up.

Since it was casual Friday and I have the next two days to relax and think about my future, I’m going to take it a little easy with tonight’s entry. I truly don’t know what I’m going to write about tonight, and that thought will be a part of this entry. Real professional, right?

I watched the very first episode of Daredevil on Netflix today, and holy mother of Mary, what an incredible pilot. The fighting scenes were brutal. I loved the tone, and since my main familiarity with the character is from Mark Waid’s run on Daredevil, I loved how they lightened him up and not made him some gritty, laconic, and depressed superhero. A big reason why I’m keeping this entry casual is so I can watch the next episode before I have to read before bed. Horrible priorities, but it’s Daredevil!

I made a bit more progress toward satisfying my curiosity regarding graduate school. Some schools don’t ask for a GPA from undergraduate school and others do. I didn’t have a great GPA while at USC, and that may be my death knell. These schools do require a GRE score, so that could be my saving grace — if I get a good score. I still need to look into that some more before I commit, but if I can study for it now and practice it for the rest of the year or so, then I could have a chance to get into at least one creating writing graduate school. I want to make a list of all the possible schools I could apply to, list out their requirements, and do the work. Like what’s increasingly becoming my motto, if it’s not hard, it’s not worth doing, right?

I have three more weeks of working out before I’m done with my last round of Insanity workouts. I’ve already done about five weeks of this, and I’m sore right now, so that should tell you how tough these are. I’ve been working out on an almost daily basis since October 1st of last year, and I’m still getting sore. I’m not sure what I’m going to do once I finish — P90X? — but after doing Insanity for the past six months, I want to keep doing something that’s fast, hard, and awesome. I don’t want to go to the gym and mindlessly lift weights. I want to move. I have three weeks to figure this out.

Life is awesome when I have shit to do. And I have shit to do.

I read this article today in the New York Times that was about whether writers think getting an MFA from a creative writing program is worth it. Unsurprisingly, some do and some don’t. Since I’ve graduated from college in 2008, I thought about applying to an MFA program about a handful of times, and each time I wasn’t serious about it. There were a lot of reasons why I didn’t want to go back to school. For example, I didn’t want to accrue more student debt, I didn’t want to spend more time in writer’s room where the life of all the stories was sucked away and beaten to death by other writers, and I didn’t want to do the work of applying to each school I was interested in. Today, none of those things are true anymore.

The article mentioned that a lot of schools pay for most, if not all, of the costs to attend their school, and some even offer a stipend on top of covering the required school costs to live off of while the students focus on their writing. I want my writing to be read by better writers than me and attending these workshops seems really attractive to me. I haven’t checked any of the application requirements for any school yet, but I’m sure most of them are tough, and that’s also attractive to me. If it’s not hard, it’s not worth doing, right?

I’ve been daydreaming all day about going back to school, and I really loved dreaming about it. I could go to school in Iowa or New York or California, and I can meet a vast array of people and do a vast array of things. I don’t know how far I’ll pursue this, and I don’t know how much this is all just wishful thinking, but for the first time in a long time I felt like this was something worth doing right. This could potentially change my life, and if I do it and I get in to a graduate school?

I don’t want to think that I need to go back to school to become a good writer. All the work I’m doing now is helping me get there. Part of me also feels like going back to college will be a distraction, and that I may not succeed as much as I would if I continued down the path I’m on right now. Leading a successful life as a published writer is one of the toughest things for anyone to do, especially for a nobody like me. And, to be brutally honest, the novel I’m working on right now is terrible. Even if I rewrite it and improve it as much as I can, I don’t think it’ll be good enough to be published anywhere. Who knows, though. Anything can happen between now and the time I’m done with the last draft of it. It could be decent.

Application deadlines ended months ago, giving me all year to think about this, and I plan to take my time considering this decision. It could change my life.

Finding something new or relevant or interesting to write about on a daily basis is difficult, and it’s a curse I have to bear for at least five more months. Recently, I’ve been reading many of my old journal entries from around 5-6 years ago, as well as the entries for this blog from the past few months, and I’ve found myself bored as I’ve read through them. It doesn’t help that I’m not writing a story with my journals; they are just journals after all. They’re not meant to be read as a story except in the most personal sense, to see my progression or lack thereof as a person, and to see all the obstacles I’ve overcome and those that I didn’t. I don’t want to release bad material, but I also have to adjust my expectations for what I’m doing.

I’m not writing a specialized blog, like a productivity blog or a gadget blog. My name is the title because I’m writing about myself. I’m writing about the progress I’m making on whatever journey it is I’m on, about my thoughts on random things, about my yearnings and desires and wishes for everything else. This isn’t a reaction to anyone or anything. For all I know, nobody reads my blog. I’m writing about this for myself because sometimes I don’t know what to write about, and I need to write something to see what it is I’m thinking.

I want to improve. If anything, that’s the biggest theme for my blog. I want to be a better writer, and I want to have a physically fit body, and I above all right now, I want to be a much better reader. Part of all of this should be trying to be a better blogger. I don’t know what that means. I’ve been kicking around the idea of creating an editorial calendar, where I plan out a week or more worth of topics to write about. I don’t know if that works for the type of personal writing I’m doing. The thing about ideas, though, is that they evolve, and that’s what I’m hoping for with that idea. I also planned to write reviews for many of the apps I used, but that’s turning out to be more difficult than I imagined. I’m having difficulty making time for it.

I’m also thinking about the last day of my 365 day journey. What am I going to do after? I know I’m going to keep my blog because of how important it’s become in my life. I don’t think I’m going to continue writing in it daily like I am now. I will miss it, though. Forcing myself to write something somewhat meaningful to me is very tough, especially when I write so much already. But I love writing a friggin’ lot. After 470+ words, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t know what I’m doing or what I’ll be doing tomorrow let alone the future. That sounds about right to me.

The days are getting longer in Montana. I’m staring at my window and can see the bright rays of the sun seep through the blinds. I’m amazed by how the seasons color my memories of Montana. When I lived in southern California, I never took stock of the weather because it fluctuated from rainy to warm to hot. I don’t even think about the weather when I recall the memories I made there. I moved to Montana three years ago with a few bags and absolutely no idea what was in store for me. I’m happy with how things turned out.

Sometimes I yearn for the bigger city because western Montana is very sparsely populated. I live in a town of 1,800 people. My college dorm room freshman year had more people than that. Missoula, Montana, with a population of 112,000 people, lies about 45 minutes south of where I live now, and I’ve considered moving there but haven’t. I don’t plan to move there now because I have a great job, but I know in the coming years I’m going to think about it. The other day I thought about moving to a city, something like Seattle or Portland. I don’t plan to move back to southern California for years, if ever. I don’t know when I made that decision, but it wasn’t recent. I somehow knew I wasn’t coming back the moment I stepped off that plane three years ago.

I don’t believe I’ve tried very hard to meet women while I’ve lived here. I didn’t when I lived in California. In all honesty, even though I yearn for a woman’s touch sometimes, it’s not as often as it used to be. I’m very focused on my work and on improving my craft, and more than one person has told me that a girl might “corrupt” me. I truly want to be excellent, and I don’t know how much time or energy I want to give toward dating women in pursuit of that. I’m only on day 212, giving me over 150 days before I consider stopping my daily entries. I will finish the first draft of my novel in the next few months, and I will start firefighting shortly after that. I have a busy schedule, and all I want to do is more.

I saw the young teenage girl I’ve had my eye on at school, and I didn’t talk to her like I planned to last week. I have to look elsewhere. I need to look for a girl much older, much more mature, and with some life experiences. I used to think the right girl was out there for me. I used to dream about her, but as I’ve gotten older, those dreams seemed to have disappeared. Now I don’t know if the right girl exists or if I should even be looking. I want to find someone I don’t even know I want, someone who fills the voids I don’t even know I have. I’m ready for the next chapter for my story in Montana. I hope I won’t be alone during it.

I almost didn’t workout today. There was a leak in my sink that had been dripping water for what looked like weeks. I had paper towels under it, and they had been soaking up all the water. The only reason I knew there was a leak was by the smell of the mold it cultivated. I texted my landlord, but he was about an hour north with his father at the hospital, so he wasn’t able to come over and fix it. Instead, he asked his sister’s husband to come over and check it out. He was in and out of my house for a few hours, and he fixed it. The landlord will have to tear down the wall behind the sink and replace it. I’m supposed to check underneath the sink for a few weeks until then to see if the mold returns. His repairs pushed my workout further and further into the night, and once he finished, I briefly debated whether I would workout or not.

I want to live a great life. As cliché as that sounds, I want to experience all that life has to offer me. To do that, I have to be better than better. I have to be strong, both physically and mentally, and I have to push myself to do the things I do not feel like doing. I made a commitment with myself today to workout, and I wasn’t going to let some unexpected event deter me from that. I really wanted to, though. I even knew how I was going to do it. I would have pushed all my workouts forward by a day, and instead of taking Sunday off, I wouldn’t have had a rest day until the following Sunday, almost two weeks from now.

I worked out as hard I could, and I felt great. There were times during the workout when I didn’t, and I wanted to rest, to take a breath, and I did sometimes but not without a fight. Especially when every ounce of my being wanted to stop because the pain hurt or because my lungs needed more air, I pushed myself harder because I know that’s the only way to get stronger. If it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t count. If that’s the case, I’m wasting my time and sweating for no reason.

Life is too short to live it in mediocrity. I have to have to best and strongest body I can. I have to read and learn as much as I can for hours every day. I have to write every day and learn and improve and master my craft. Anything less than this is mediocre and pointless. Excellence isn’t given to anyone. It has to be earned. An unearned life is not worth living.

I don’t always live up to my ideals. I want to be better, and I want to fight harder than I do, but the perfunctoriness of life can weigh me down. It’s during those times where I have to be more vigilant. It’s hard — really hard — especially when I’m tired, but if it’s not hard, it’s not worth doing.