[500 Words] Day 2: What Do I Want to Accomplish?

Here comes day 2. The reason I want to take on this challenge, as I said before, is to hone my craft as a writer. A good translator needs to be able to write in his own voice - this serves to make the translation more natural, and also to differentiate his work from that of others. To get there, to find my own voice, I need to practice. I imagine it's a bit like sculpting: with each post, I'm chiseling away extraneous bits to reveal the sculpture beneath, one that bears my identity. Hopefully, after 31 days of at least 500 words, or at least 15,500 words, I can find that voice, or get closer to it.

A necessary skill of any freelancer is being able to find the time. I'm constantly challenged to find time to do anything other than spending time with my two children. From chores around the apartment to exercising, from sleep to work, I'm always trying to scrape together some time, or steal some here and there, to get these things done. My wife and I have managed to schedule our children's sleep so that we get a chunk of time at night to do our own things, so it's not too difficult for me to spend some 30 min to an hour to write something before I call it a night, at least when I don't have work.

The real challenge is deciding what to write. I don't really have any particular knowledge that begs to be shared that's worth 15,500 words. I'm not exactly the creative type either - I do wish I were a better storyteller, someone who can make even the mundane dramatic. I don't even know if I can write about my children for that long. The year I wrote weekly blog posts about being a father and about T's development over the first year of his life. Writing everyday is a task on an entirely different difficulty level. I'm not passionate about anything right now in particular. I would hate for anyone who actually is reading this to have to read through 31 days of this crap that drags on and on without any apparent focus. But please cut me some slack, as I've got to start somewhere right? After all, if I were already a good writer, I wouldn't be doing this challenge in the first place.

I guess hopefully by the time this challenge comes to a close, I'll be better at planning blog posts. Yes, I'm only realizing now that I may actually need to plan my posts and organize my thoughts. And this will also force me to think longer and harder about what I have to share with the rest of you that can only come from me. Maybe this will turn out to be more than a writing exercise, it may be a chance for me to look deeper into myself, to learn about myself a bit more. But I'm getting too far ahead of myself. What shall I write about tomorrow?