50 Day Challenge Update: Week 5
By: Steve B Howard
Tags: Challenge, Writing, Goals, Meditation, The Partnered Pen

Daily Challenge 1. stretch 2. write 3. meditate 4. promoting my books and blog. An update on how my personal challenge is going.

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Week five already. This fifty day challenge is flying by. No big changes from last week to report though the weather turned pretty cold and we’ve gotten snow the last few days here in Nagoya. Not enough to stick around, but every morning we wake up to a nice little dusting.

Daily Stretch

I think that the colder weather will make my daily stretches even more important to prevent any muscles pulls or strains. I’ve noticed that I’m a bit stiffer when I wake up in the morning now. On the days that I have time I’ve been waiting a little longer before I stretch to try and get my body warmed up a little bit first. This seems to help with the stiffness.

2. 500 Words a Day

Still cruising on this one. Getting a little bit faster each time. I was able to get out some publishable work as well. Nothing real long, but at least the quality was good enough to be published. Also, I’ve had a few days where I’ve hit seven hundred, eight hundred, and even one thousand words in a day. Not bad at all.

3. Daily Book Promotions

I had a little bit of luck with the promos last week, I was able to sell about four books. Right now I seem to have the best luck when I make some sort of a personal connection with someone on social media first. Blindly promoting on social media hasn’t produced much lately or in the past, but when someone replies to one of my posts and I reply back sometimes that leads to a book sale. I wish I had more time for that sort of interaction with potential readers. I just don’t have the time to follow up on all the comments I get.

4. Daily Meditation

Not much has really changed here either. I sit for about six minutes or so until I feel that wonderful surge of contentment and my mind is clear and sharp. At that point I generally stop meditating and write so that I can ride that wave for a while and get some words down.

I’ve also come up with a concept for a possible new book. One of my most popular article on Medium (35k reads so far) was about my experiences when I belonged to a Yoga cult. I realized I have enough material to expand that into a book. That is another project I hope to start and complete sometime next year. This is the original article if anyone is interested.

That’s all for this week. I’ll be coasting into the final week here pretty soon. Pretty excited to see that I’ll probably finish this fifty day challenge.

Steve Howard has published flash fiction, short stories, haibun, and creative non-fiction, poetry and haiku in numerous literary journals. His self-published collection of short stories Satori in the Slip Stream, Something Gaijin This Way Comes, and others were released in 2018. His poetry collection Diet of a Piss Poor Poet was released in 2019. Book One of Mystical Meat Machines was released in 2020. He currently teaches English in Japan and is a semi-professional stand up comedian. For a FREE copy of his “Best of 2020” PDF book subscribe to his blog here.