The early morning of August 19, 2024, I sat down at the open window of my apartment with my favorite ballpoint pen, usual thermos of black coffee, and an inexpensive clipboard, to which was attached a single sheet of equally economical copier paper. My intention was to fill it and one just like it with a piece of creative writing each and every day for the entire following year. The genre was totally irrelevant: fiction or nonfiction—it didn’t matter a bit as long as I had turned what was a blank page at the beginning of the day into one covered with black ink in my handwriting by the time I crawled into bed at night.

Truth be told, I’ve never been the most disciplined person in this regard, so seeing this idea of mine through to fruition felt like a pretty daunting task, as there would certainly be at least one day when, if nothing else, I simply wouldn’t feel like doing it—a self-sabotaging behavior with which I had unfortunately become all too familiar throughout the course of my life. But what do you know? On August 18, 2025, I ultimately succeeded by snapping open the 3-ring binder containing the stack of three hundred sixty-four consecutive prior entries and dropping the final one into place.

The vast majority of them had been penned while sitting at that exact same window—either open or closed depending on the season. However, I also managed to make time to scribble down a few hundred or so words from elsewhere while away: a longtime friend’s place in the northwest suburbs of Chicago in January, my niece’s home and the airport in Sarasota, Florida, during a visit in March, a small cabin situated on the grounds of a Buddhist Monastery in Mississippi in mid-July, and, interestingly enough, the passenger seat of a U-Haul truck as my son and I bounced our way eastward through Kansas along Interstate 70 one Friday afternoon later that same month. I should also note that I rarely reread or checked any of it for content, spelling, or grammar. Perfection wasn’t the point. The whole purpose of the exercise was to practice getting out of my own way through the incorporation of disciplined action, something from which so many of us, particularly we creative types, could certainly benefit to one degree or another: To be able to say, “I did it.”