As I blogged last month, on January 4th I set the daily audacious goal of writing or editing a poem 5 days a week until today, February 4th. Meeting my goal would mean I’d have 23 new or revised poems by today. The actual count as of today: 16. You – or I – could look on that as a failure, but I’ve decided it was a resounding success. Here are five things I learned from pursuing my daily audacious goal:

1. Life gets in the way. I hear you now, saying, “Well, duh,” but I think it’s an important thing to keep in mind. In the course of the month, my mother was hospitalized for 10 days, we had two series of snow days (which can be nice, but are also disruptive to routine), and there were all the usual opportunities  to do the loving wife/mom/friend/dedicated worker routine. Plus, as I further explain in my blog on Our Lady of the Spiral Notebook, I am a sloth in January. I lie on the sofa – a lot. And although I do have a very nifty little notebook PC, I still can’t type a poem while lying on the sofa. This leads me to…
2. There’s a fine line between motivated and stressed. There were a few days during the month when I started feeling guilty about not getting to my poetry. I had to remind myself (as BevAnn had commented) that being motivated leads to progress; feeling guilty doesn’t. When this happened, I went back to my “January 2010″ folder on my computer and saw all the poems already there, reread some of them, and reminded myself they weren’t there in December!
3. The editor/critic sitting on my shoulder slowed me down. OK, so I can be a little obsessive about finding the right words. And even though Martha had commented on my last post that I shouldn’t worry about being perfect – well, I did say my goal was to write or edit every day. I’m afraid I got stuck on the same poems several days. However, the goal simply kept my head in the game, and…
4. The editor/critic sitting on my shoulder also helped me polish some work to a finished state. Of those 16 poems, 5 of them are finished products, ready to submit to journals. For me, five finished poems in one month is a huge accomplishment. I’m happy I yielded to my instincts and kept working on them.
5. Accountability really does help. Because I knew I had to report back on this blog, and because I knew Lori, Martha, Suzanne, Laura, Tessa, BevAnn and others were on this journey with me in their own fashion, I felt a higher obligation to my commitment. Thanks to you all, and I hope you’ll share how your own daily audacious goals have turned out!

My next risk: I joke that I’m a “recovering” Sunday school teacher. Exactly what I’m recovering from is a complex subject I don’t fully understand, but for many years now I’ve been trying to reconcile my faith with my writing. I don’t particularly want to write “churchy” stuff, but I do wonder if I have a calling to write and talk about faith more than I already do. Although I’ve looked at a couple of academic programs that meld the two subjects, I’m not philosophically or financially ready to take them on. So, I’m excited – but a little nervous – about enrolling in The Abbey of the Arts’ online course on Benedictine Spiritual Practices. It’s another daily commitment, so here I go again!

Kory Wells would like to say she brazenly tossed aside her twenty-year career as a software developer to forge a lucrative career in poetry. She’s content to report that she now writes poetry, prose, corporate communications, and the occasional snippet of software code in a life-work balance that functions pretty well most of the time. Author of the poetry collection Heaven Was the Moon, she’s been recognized by Ladies’ Home Journal for her “standout” writing in the anthology She’s Such a Geek. Visit Kory's website.
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