I’m participating in the 100 day project this year (2020) and this post serves as my declaration. From April 7 until they say stop, I’m going to write a mosaic novel in the adult epic fantasy space. The 100 day project is usually a visual art study posted on instagram, but I’m aiming to pin down a very deliberate sort of magic that I accidentally cast last year. After ten years of typing book shaped objects, I created a novel for the first time. My goal is to shorten that ten years to one hundred days.

I’ve spent most of the last decade studying YA and MG, so the audience level of this project is quite a bit different. To check in, I will be posting daily. The big bad manifesto post claimed this space for writing lessons I have learned, and this blog will one day remind me of those lessons when I am staring at that infernal blinking cursor.

As we all know, to be a good writer, you must first be a voracious reader. In this age, we take our creative lessons from all works. Actually, it’s what we’ve always done.

To start us out, I highly recommend taking a look at Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author”. That isn’t the formal title, and that isn’t what the piece is about on its face. “Death of the Author” is the concept that once you publish a work, you no longer exist. That work goes out to the reader and is consumed into a space without you. You get no say in how your work is viewed.

**A blog is a little different. Just a note, I have a very active spam catcher. If you leave a comment, I have about 2,500 spam comments to dig through to find it. Please be patient and respectful of this space. I don’t tolerate hate, and you certainly shouldn’t have to put up with it.**

The concept is also “we all consume media differently” or perhaps “everything we see, hear, and every person we meet leaves a thumbprint on our minds that shape the way we read and listen and see, that reshape the way we think about the things we have already read and heard and viewed, and the people we have already met.” It’s a little unwieldy, I’m sure someone has said it shorter.

I’m planning to have one work or author per post and a little thing I noticed or something from that piece or person that shaped how I either consume or create media. And through it all, I’ll be writing.

This is a snapshot. The way I view the media I have consumed is affected by the media I have consumed up until this point, all the people I have already met, and all the thoughts I have had. Tomorrow, I may be a different person. In ten years, I may have a vastly different opinion.

There is nothing in this world that does not change; even the dead decay.