Health Activist Writer's Month Challenge!

The Health Activist Writer's Month Challenge 2012

Can you do 30 health posts in 30 days?

Health Activists are incredible communicators, always sharing great info, ideas, and support for their online community.  It's time to get extra creative! April is our Health Activist Writer's Month and brings the official Health Activist Writer's Month Challenge (#HAWMC).

We've prepared 30 health-related prompts that will help you get creative on your blog, Facebook page, or health community all month long.  Take the challenge and do a post a day for all 30 days of April!
Sign up now and we'll send you all 30 prompts before April starts so you can start your planning (and writing!) early.  We'll also send you 30 images you can use on your blog to show your readers that you're participating in #HAWMC.



I posted about this a little while back but wanted to post it again since it begins tomorrow!! I am seriously going to attempt to make 30 posts in 30 days. On a number I am planning on using the prompts I was sent for joining early. But, one thing is that I don't HAVE to use the prompts so I may just do my own thing on some days. I know a few days I am not very likely to use the prompts.  I am just not THAT creative!  Thankfully, here are the rules of the challenge:

• Write something every day of April. Note: You don’t have to use our Prompts (remember that those are fun suggestions) but you should try to post something every day.  
• You have 2 “Get Out Of Post Free” days if you need – so use them wisely.
• Share your posts with us and with fellow posters.
• Have fun and be creative!

  

I know I will be working hard to write these 30 posts!

Health Activist Writer's Month Challenge

Hey everyone - I just wanted to tell you about a new activity I'll be doing this April. The Health Activist Writer's Month Challenge hosted by WEGO Health. I will be writing a post a day for all 30 days. I hope you'll join me in writing every day about health. It's going to be a lot of fun and I'd love to see what you have to say about each of the topics, too. All you have to do to join is sign up here: http://info.wegohealth.com/HAWMC2012 and you'll be able to start posting once April rolls around. Looking forward to writing with you!

I am looking forward to this challenge! And for me, it will definitely be a challenge. I tend not to write daily, and sometimes not even weekly or even monthly, on here. Or anywhere really. I need to write more often. But to do that, I need to discipline myself and not allow distractions to lure me away. And the thing is, the distractions themselves ARE truly helpful tools much of the time. Those same things that cause me to become distraction, also help me do things. So it's a double-edged sword. It goes back to discipline! I need to become more disciplined about a few things. One being writing time, the other goes along with that really. I need to be more disciplined about transcribing my Mom's journals from when I was in the hospital. I That goes with the writing in that eventually, I think my goal will be to do what a number of people have told me I should do, which is write a book about my experiences. I just have to decide how I want to approach that goal. I know the MAJOR focus of it will be what happened between Dec. 2008 and Nov. 2011 and even beyond that to include my "integration" back into society outside the nursing home. So, I am hoping this #HAWMC will help me get back into writing more often. I haven't produced many pieces. But the ones I have done have been received fairly well. I know I have a few ideas for pieces not directly related to my personal experiences over the last few years. One is going to be similar to my What RA is like piece. I just need to get it all out and to do that, it takes discipline, something I seem to be sorely lacking lately.

I know I have my hand in a lot of pies, but none of them are SO time consuming that I can claim they keep me from writing. Some days it is a matter of feeling inspired. Other days (on very rare occasions) I am not home and simply don't have time to write. But those are VERY few and far between. Even the 2 Fridays a month that I am not home much of the day because of His Hands Ministries group at Conway Manor, with my sleep schedule, or lack thereof, I can manage to get writing time in, IF I'd push myself to do it. Even the prep time for those Fridays doesn't take so much time that it would interfere with writing daily. My personal Bible study/devotional time wouldn't interfere. My work with 4RATalk, IAAM and any other of the health groups I do things for, is not so time consuming that I'd have a hard time finding a few hours to write. Even keeping up with what little I am able to do around the house doesn't really interfere. Maybe on weekends when I like to be with my family, but there are a number of weekends we just all hang out, not doing anything special. Just have down time to watch TV or movies, play video games, play board games, things like that. Even those days, I could find an hour to write. So I have NO excuses.  I just need to DO IT! Again, it's a matter of discipline. Disciplining myself to make a schedule and stick with it, even on days that I feel horrible and can't think straight and am likely to make all kinds of typographical and grammatical errors. I need to give myself permission to leave the errors alone on those days the fog is so bad I can hardly think and either let them be a testament to just how bad the fog can affect a person OR  leave them on a temporary basis until I am out of the fog and thinking better. I can guarantee that I'd HAVE to fix them later. If I didn't, they'd bother me a lot. I'm not perfect, I know I make errors with grammar, BUT I also cannot let typos and things that I've worded very awkwardly stay around. It would make me look as if I don't care about the quality of my writing, or worse, make me look uneducated. Looking uneducated would let down those teachers who worked hard to teach me proper grammar, spelling etc I know better and expect more of myself so I'd have to fix the errors, but I need to give myself permission to go ahead and write even on those fog days and not worry so much about fixing mistakes immediately when I can hardly spell simple words. I can fix it later. I can even add a disclaimer to posts on those days that I am struggling and know there are likely errors and I will edit at a later time. But, I have to give myself that permission first and then fight the innate habit to fix things immediately.

So, hopefully, having this challenge will help me get over the lack of discipline I've had about writing lately. I will be tagging all of my posts on here and Facebook for the challenge with the hash tag for Twitter (#HAWMC) so that I remember to do it on Twitter! I would have been tagging them on here, so to me it makes sense to use the same tag for all platforms. And since the # is required for Twitter, I'll be consistent and use it everywhere. I'm sure I'll add other tags as needed on here if they fit other categories.