Forward to The Daily Writing Rewind 2023 - Director's Cut

FORWARD

This is a collection of messy imperfections.  Everything in this book was written sometime between January 1 and December 31, 2023.  Everything is a first draft.  When I sit down to write every single day (a practice I’ve committed to since January 1, 2011), sometimes I only have five minutes, sometimes I have the entire day.  Some days the content is stronger than others.  My goal isn’t to write perfectly or commercially every single day – it’s to write something every single day.  This collection is the Daily Writing Rewind Director’s Cut, so to speak, of the 2023 project, my selections of the best somethings I wrote all year.  

A note about the title: The Daily Writing Rewind is called as such because this daily writing project paid homage to the twelve previous themes that carried me through each year:

JANUARY - 2011 - the original blog where I vowed to write something every day.

FEBRUARY - 2012 - the all-fiction blog where my friends wrote all of the stories’ first lines.

MARCH - 2013 - the “triple play” where friends gave me any three “things” and I had to incorporate them into a piece of writing.

APRIL - 2014 - the “choose-your-own adventure” blog where I’d write a piece of a story and friends would vote on what happened next.

MAY - 2015 - the all-music blog where friends suggested the songs that inspired each day’s writing.

JUNE - 2016 - the “ABC’s” where each day was themed by a letter and friends gave me words that began with that letter.

JULY - 2017 - this “inspired” theme asked friends for quotes or sayings that motivated them.

AUGUST - 2018 - friends wrote the blog titles and I took it from there.

SEPTEMBER - 2019 - this “today’s special” theme emphasized what made that day stand out.

OCTOBER - 2020 - here, friends supplied images to inspire the daily writing.

NOVEMBER - 2021 - for this “anything goes” theme, I asked friends to send me reader questions to inspire posts (and just wrote whatever I wanted on the days with no reader questions).

DECEMBER - 2022 - in the final month, I “wrote for me,” determining on my own what I wanted to write about every day.

In this Director’s Cut version of the Daily Writing Rewind, I am opting to group things by genre: fiction, creative nonfiction, nonfiction, and poetry.  Each piece will have a date at the end so you will know when it was written.  I am also opting to put things in order by genre.  That doesn’t necessarily create a chronology of my year, but in some instances (especially in the nonfiction section), earlier posts may reference a later post and so it seemed simplest to order the contents in this way.

All short stories, essays, poems, and the longer choose-your-own-adventure story are unedited from what was originally shared on the blog.  The only exceptions are where I removed video or audio links (obviously not conducive to a paperback book) and in more rare instances where I removed photos.  This is a little bit of “inside baseball,” but some of the pictures shared in the actual Daily Writing Rewind blog were added to give each post a thumbnail image.  In the spots where the images weren’t necessary, I took them out.  There were also a few spots where spell or grammar check suggested changes that are now applied in this Director’s Cut version.

That said, there are probably other type-os, spelling errors, grammar errors, and other kinds of errors.  If that sort of thing really bothers you, I’m sorry, but I won’t refund your money.  The messy contents of this book aren’t edited by an outsider – they’re barely edited by me!  I suppose I could devote a ton of time and even money into going through such an editorial process – but the beauty of a project like this is what emerges without edits.  It’s all raw data, my literal thought process or what words came to me and then became part of the piece I was writing.

Writing is a spiritual practice to me.  It brings me joy.  It energizes me.  It gives shape to my experiences and frames (or reframes) my feelings.  A psychic once told me that writing would never “make me rich,” but she said I should stick with it because “it was great therapy for me.”  That was 2013, before my writing became as personal and vulnerable as it’s become in more recent years, so at the time I thought that was both disappointing and confusing advice.

It proved to be dead-on accurate, though.

So, without further adieu and with an immense amount of gratitude for your support of this project, here is the Director’s Cut of the Daily Writing Rewind 2023.  

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