The Journey of 500 Days

“The journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step.” is a saying attributed to Laozi. He’s regarded as the founder of Taoism and the author of “Toa Te Ching”.

It’s a quote I’ve often heard to encourage someone to start a difficult task or journey. Another phrase for the same purpose is “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” - no idea who the source for that is.

On January 1, 2023 I took the first step on a journey that has brought me to today. For the last 500 days I have published a post of some kind on Hive.

Lately, most of my posts are on dBuzz.

My dBuzz posts are my Daily Echoes. I’ll talk about them more next month when I reach 365 days of publishing them. The short story for them is — every day I begin with a word, then I create an image in Midjourney to represent the word and its meaning. Then I write a quote to resonate with the image.

The words come from the Prompt A Day emails I send subscribers every day. I create the prompts once a month. It was an interesting coincidence that today’s word was “Journey”.

It has indeed been a journey. We’re all on a journey in life. Some of us notice the journey segments more than others.

This segment started months before Jan 1, 2023. I’ve blogged for many years, usually on my own blogs. I was inconsistent. I’d publish regularly for a while and then I’d trail off to nothing.

In 2022 I joined @alessandrawhite’s Creative Work Hour and found I was starting to be more consistent with my creativity. I started my newsletter, Nicheless & Loving, which published weekly. Even had a streak where I published content every day for over 200 days.

In December 2022 I noticed a badge appear on @hivebuzz, a new badge. It would be awarded to people who’d published every day for the year.

Now, that intrigued me. I decided I would give it a try and see how the year went. I completed it and kept right going into 2024.

Early in 2023, AI started to really come to public awareness. I was intrigued to learn more about it and to try it out. My first venture into it was using Midjourney.

At the time Midjourney had the trial allowing you to generate 25 pictures for free. I loved that it was in Discord and that I could invite the bot to my server.

I burned through the free images quickly, took out a subscription and burned through the first level almost as fast. I was hooked and wanted to learn how to make this bot work well.

Some of the posts I wrote were about Midjourney. In mid-June I started creating what has become known as the Daily Echo. The first 2-3 hours of my day is taken up creating the image and crafting the quote that accompanies it.

I have some non-Hive projects underway. One is using some of the images not used for the daily image to create digital products with. I’ll write about them soon.

One project I want to get back to is writing reflections based on the images. It’s been a year of not only learning new words and how to visually present them, but also understanding the symbolism that each word can reflect.

I love having so many creative ideas I’m working on, even if having time for them all is a struggle.

I’ve created a habit of making sure I publish every day. Making that my first priority every day motivates me to move from that post to the next item on my list, getting things done, even if the progress is gradual.

Shadowspub writes on various subjects as she pursues her passion for learning. She also writes on other platforms and enjoys creating books you use, like journals, notebooks, colouring books, etc. Her Nicheless Narrative podcast airs on Thursdays each week.

NOTE: unless otherwise stated, all images are the author’s. AI generated images were in Midjourney, for which I hold a licence to use the images commercially.

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