The first and real ambition

At last I can sit and write of my ambitions. Such a vision has proved elusive because I do not respect the measure of success around me. My ambitions are to read and write, and to embrace moderation. In moderation can I be passionate. But I have barely written or read for many years.

For the past seven weeks I have read for 30 minutes a day, or rather I have developed the habit that means I now do this. Even on days when meander on the internet, idly browsing reddit and social media, the day becomes worthy if I complete that 90 minutes of focused reading and writing. From today, I intend for that to be 120 minutes (-20 minutes of relaxation time). 

That is the focus of my day. Should I do this, then the rest of the day is ideal. 

If I complete:

3.5 hours of reading a week

16 hours of reading a month

Then I will read 288000 words each month.

In a year that is 3.45 million words. That equates to 43 books of a length of 180 pages.

If I can write at a rate of 250 words per day (30 minutes), then that’s 1750 words per week, or 91000 words in a year.

The power of this habit is clear to me: for decades I have struggled with the moderation of reading, falling asleep and reading only at length at irregular times. Reading 25 minutes a day is doable. 

What kind of writing do I want to do?

I.       Teaching

A.   Medium – publish on a public forums to experience an actual readership.

B.   Anonymous

1.   consider the realities of teaching (on this blog) should I be so moved

C.   My main website – Links to books I will write?

I want to write under my penname for a significant length of time. I do not want to compromise my teaching position quite yet. Should I begin to write more at length, then I will consider changing my name.

I want a passive income to sell books:

III.    Resource Selling

A.   Books on how to teach – not under a penname.

B.   Online Shops = anonymous

1.   Name with Colleague or otherwise?

C.   Books - Kindle etc

1.   Study Guide

2.   Exam Guide

3.   Poetry Guides

I will consider in a month what I am able to do. 

What is a worthy ambition for now?

For decades the best part of me is the writing part. Yet I rarely write. Since 2003 I have been in survival mode. My family broke that year, my father fucking my family for nothing while I engaged in a string of failed relationships. Seeking physical connection and emotional satiation weakened my resolve to write. To write is to struggle but my struggle lay in the physicalities of life. 

Yet writing is my most empowered state. To weave a narrative that I believe and others might consider moves me beyond what I might achieve otherwise. My writing is immature though, infantile and ill-developed. I hardly read until about four years ago, so my writing was nebulous in its ambition and weak in its execution. Over the past four years, I have read much more. My writing boots are tougher and so it is time to stride forth from the murky frame of these small walls into the dangerous wilderness of a mind I must explore.

To write is to manage attention. Attention and focus are such poor words for what they mean to me. To bring the full capacity of my mind and body to a task sees me at my most formidable. Internet browsing and physical follies weaken my attention though, fragmenting my focus and straying me away from writing landmarks into baser plains of life. Experiences like liquid girl make me realise that to approach a project with unsocial intensity makes me feel alive.

When I do direct my focus, as I did so today with my bookclub, I experience no satiation, a waned appetite for communication and connection. The intensity I express might feel too much for others;  such intensity of focus often feels like a desync, like my connection with my colleagues is pointless. Yet I need that intensity. I cannot simply survive, especially when I have compromised my finances in order to free up my mental and emotional space to write.

My teaching might have helped me for a time. But now my teaching fails to excite me. The culture of classroom teaching bores me, its frivolous and half-hearted ideas often lay dead at the door, effigies to what may have been noble in a more naive time. My ambitions of teaching have been largely realised. I do not need to focus so much with that.

Instead need better ambitions, writing ambitions. Ambitions are hard for me to appreciate let alone create. I come from a boring industrial town in the lower middle of England. A fragment of desire still remains in me; the industriousness of the spurned burns in me still. My soul is battered from so many failed attempts to continue a writing habit, old weaknesses coming to haunt me, tripping me while the habit eats me whole. Instead of tackling the need to write whole pieces, to write in accordance with Pomodoros - for a length of time - is a wiser approach than to simply create content.

Rereading this post I can see I have been too hard on myself. I feel that unless I write and read extensively then my time has been ill-spent, that eight hours of reading is necessary a day to be a writer. That is not a position I should find myself in. To write for 30 minutes a day on average everyday would be a quantum leap from what I do now.

To use theprose.com as an ambition to write is something I can do. No more writing for now about this - doing is what I need. Writing without losing my job is my current ambition.