400

400. It’s such a cool number. A little more than a year. 400 years ago, in 1618, Johannes Kepler discovered the third law of planetary motion. Noblemen in Prague started a revolution by throwing some folks out a window into a pile of manure.

But fast forward to 2018, and I’m thinking about 400 for a very different reason.

See, last week—on Nov. 21, 2018, in fact—my writing streak hit 400 days in a row.

Granted, Connor’s violin practice streak is now approaching 600 days in a row, so my 6-year-old son gives me something to aspire to.

But every day for the past 400 days, I’ve written. Not always a lot. Not always what I might consider good. But every day it’s more words down than I’ve had before.

Some of that writing is for clients and articles. Some of it is behind-the-scenes stuff that is just to help me understand my stories. (No offense, but odds are you’ll never see any of this. But you never know.) A lot of it, and an increasing amount of it, goes into my own Rucksack Universe books and stories.

But it’s every day. That’s the thing. Some days are hard. Some days are easy. But even on the trickiest, hardest day, it’s now much easier for me to write anything than to even think of skipping the writing. The writing has become a deeper, more integral part of me than ever.

So now it’s time to do more. Bring more stories to you.

2019’s gonna be fun, y’all.

Now pardon me while I do some more writing. After all, 500 days will be here before we know it.