What is this thing here?

Hi! You're probably here because I linked to this thing from some other thing or maybe I posted this on reddit. I would not know I CANNOT SEE INTO THE FUTURE. Anyway, you might wondering what in Sam Hill is (a puma) going on here and were incapable of inferring this from context. It's ok, not all of us can be mind readers, and for me, even if I am able to figure out what's going on solely from context, I always need some part of a website to explain to me what it is that's going on here, otherwise I feel incomplete or out of the loop or something. This will also serve as a FAQ and I'll update as needed.

10,000 Hours
This whole thing started thanks to Ray Bradbury and Malcom Gladwell. This specific project largely came from Ray Bradbury, I'll get to Gladwell in a minute. One day, while browsing r/writing a couple days after NaNo '11 had finished, I came across this post about seven inspirational videos related to writing. I watched most of them and I thought they were pretty good, but the one that really stood out to me was "An Evening with Ray Bradbury" which I thought was absolutely fantastic.

The relevant point he makes is pretty near the beginning, he starts off talking about the hygiene of writing. "The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a helluva lot of short stories," he then goes on to say "if you write one short story a week--doesn't matter what the quality is to start--but at least you're practising and at the end of the year you have 52 shorts stories and I defy you to write 52 bad ones."(emphasis mine).

That got me thinking (as is my wont). Well, it got me thinking of one thing in particular:

and here we are. Well, not quite, because why a blog? How else would I keep myself accountable? I figured a blag where I have to have something to show for myself would be a good place to start. we'll see how this pans out, but so far things are going to plan.

My plan of action is this: since the year starts on a Sunday (that's a good day to start a week) I'll have until Saturday at 11:59 or whatever to post a blurb confirming I've written a story for that week. Hopefully I won't be always waiting up to the last minute, but I can see that happening (especially if I work at Brighton this summer or during NaNo). Once I've confirmed, I'll post the story to a google doc for confirmation or if someone wants to read it (I ...don't think they will because it'll be pretty raw stuff, not like a story ready to go but we'll see how much editing I actually do but I mean hey, if someone wants to, they're welcome to it).

My personal requirements for a what defines a short story is relatively arbitrary. Wikipedia says "Other definitions place the maximum word count of the short story at anywhere from 1,000 to 9,000 words" so I'm going to go with that. I probably won't hold myself too hard and fast to being under 9000 words, but I get a feeling that won't be a problem. I'll be sure to write at least 1000 words though, but expect me to make exceptions for myself. My biggest requirement for myself is that the story be complete (beginning-->middle-->end and all that good stuff) by the end of the week. This doesn't necessarily mean it's presentable, but it's got the whole skeleton in place.

Things that will help me accomplish this (kind of a running list):

• 750 Words - this site is a really good motivator for me to get at least 750 words of my story done each day (unless I get distracted and just wordvomit for 750 words, in which case I'll have a nice warm up) and since there's a mechanism in place that keeps track of both how often you've written and how many distractions you had during your writing session (you get dinged for distractions), it will serve as a great way for me to at least get ~5000 words of a story out.
• r/writing and other related subreddits (there is also a very high chance reddit will be mroe detrimental than anything because hooray distraction)
• google docs, for obvious reasons
• list to be continued

But what about Malcolm Gladwell and drawing stuff? Why are you asking yourself so many rhetorical questions? Is this to pretend this is a FAQ? yes. that's exactly why. Ok, well I will now explain the second half to this project and it all goes back to Malcom Gladwell and my future (hopefully) occupation (ok, not exactly, but I'm trying to be convoluted).

In his book, Outliers, he talks about a 10,000 hour rule that states, more or less (he puts this much more eloquently in this book) that the more you do something, the better at it you get. This seems pretty intuitive but I cannot tell you how many people in my life (and I highly, HIGHLY doubt that I'm the only one) who say "oh, you're so talented at [insert thing]" I emphasised talent for a reason. I am about to get really off topic right here, so if you don't want to read the following rant but instead want me to get to the TL;DR of why I'm doing the drawing thing, skip to the paragraph that starts with "anyway this is not true at all."

People (I think, partly because I tend to do this myself and partly because I've seen people do this throughout my life) are really quick to assign another person's skills to "talent" instead of hard work, particularly in disciplines that require both creativity and practise (but seemingly, only creativity). I think part of this is a way of deflecting your own (perceived) failings, i.e. "oh, she/he was able to do that because they have a lot of TALENT, I do not have TALENT, therefore it makes sense that I am not able to create a thing like that thing" (did I really just turn that into a schema? I really hope it was valid deductive argument, even if it's unsound. let's see... A is do that thing, B is talent, not B... not A. I DID LEARN SOMETHING IN MY PHILOSOPHY CLASS AFTER ALL. Slightly-Less-Terrifying-British-Mr.-Campbell would be proud)

Anyway, this is obviously not true at all. People are good at art because they do it and they do it and they do it over and over again forever until they stop sucking and are brilliant. Which leads me back to Malcolm Gladwell. He says that in order to stop sucking and become brilliant at a thing, you need to do it for at least 10,000 hours (okay, obviously the shift is not so binary, but I'm just going to say it is right now for all intents and purposes in my life) and gives various examples. Again, my thought was

but I didn't really do much about it for a long time because when I read Outliers the first time, I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life. I now have the distinct advantage of having a goal for my life. Whether or not I actually get there isn't as important to me, because you never know what life's curve balls may be, but I'm getting off topic. I eventually want to do animation for a living and want to get into a certain prestigious animation programme that wants more than anything else for their students to know how to draw. So obviously this project will help me to closer to that mythical 10,000 hours of drawing. No, I have no idea how many hours I've done before this year and no, I probably won't keep very close track of how much I do this coming year, but I figure every little bit helps and drawing/painting something each day is definitely going to help.

Things that will help me accomplish this (also a running list):

• r/sketchdaily for when I can't think of anything to draw (which I'm afraid will be often?)
• photoshop and my tablet

also this:

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS 
(last updated 29 - 12 - 2011)
nothing yet as no one has asked me any questions since I haven't told anyone about this project yet