The Good Patrons of 750 Words

A Note of Inspiration from Jarkko Helenius

10 cups

I just few hours ago finished my bit over 2000 words for today. My streak now stands at 365 days. A full year. It was exactly on June 1st last year when I pledged to not let my streak break off again, like it had so many times before. I had been on this site over a year already by then, but my longest streak stood at around only 100 days then.

Lot has happened in the year since. I started my own video blog, published a non-fiction book on Kindle, even went to Japan and back. I’ve written a bunch of short stories, and even do some paid writing now. I can without exaggeration call myself a writer now.

750words has played a huge role in that transformation. Sure, I’ve cheated by shifting the time zones every now and then to keep my streak alive. I don’t really care. What matters to me is that I’ve written at least 750 words for every roughly 24-hour period. I knew I could always burst out a lot of words at once, but do it only sporadically. 750words has taught me consistency.

It has taught me to come day in, day out to pound in my words. To drip good material out. There’s still lot to improve. I want to be professional, and for a professional 750 words isn’t enough. But without this as a start, I couldn’t have done it.

My journey on this site isn’t still over. I still have some badges to get, namely my space bird and NaNoWriMo badges, and thanks to the ability to customize the color scheme of the writing environment (for some reason I like green text on a black background), it has become my preferred way of writing. The built-in tracking of time, word count and other interesting stuff just makes this site all the more useful.

At first when I heard the service was going to no longer be free I felt I’d not continue using it. Of course, it stayed free for us old users. But reflecting back now, I feel like it still would be worth paying a bit of money. I hope buster has time and inspiration to further build on this site – it might already be the breeding ground of some great writers of the future – and present.

So here I end my reflection. It’s been full year of continuous writing, 679 total completed days, and nearly 600 000 words written. That’s incredible when you think of it. My life wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t discover this site back when I did. It funny how such a simple idea executed well can really change people’s lives.

Thanks Buster.

Jarkko Helenius (you’ll find me on Google :P)

Testimonial Note from Jarkko Helenius on Sat, Jun 01

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