With apologies to Ogden Nash

I find myself looking at my 28th birthday, confounded as to how I got here, I can only imagine what the next ten years will bring. I dare not speculate that far ahead, because I may get sidetracked for a couple more beers.
Instead, I am looking only one year ahead, one month at a time. Recently, the author Neil Gaiman engaged in a project in which he presented a prompt for each month of the year to his Twitter followers and is using their responses to write stories.

When I was young, I wanted to be a novelist. I read voraciously as a child; reading was in my blood and in every aspect of my family life. I wanted to be a writer.
I heard that good writers write about what they know. I don't remember how old I was when I heard that, or where I heard it. I realized that I know very little in this world, and it seemed to me, that what I did know could not be of interest to anyone else.
Eventually, I realized that I had placed strict limits on myself. After all, I enjoy fantasy and science fiction novels, and those certainly can't be written from the authors' life experiences! Well, certain elements of them can draw from the daily reality of their creators, that is what gives the stories relatable and interesting characters and what informs which details are important to describe when building a new world and which can be left to the reader's imagination.
Still, I hesitated because it seemed to me that I could never come up with an original plot or setting. It's all be written before. In a general sense, I'm sure it's true. But there are specific stories and details that haven't been combined yet.

I gave up my dream of being a novelist, feeling that I could not generate the ideas I needed, that even if I ever did manage to get something published, it would simply be an unremarkable work, and I wanted to be at the top of the field. I didn't just want to be a novelist, I wanted to be a great novelist. I wanted to be a household name.
That is not going to happen. It happens to very few people, and I will not be one of them. But none of them would be where they are if they didn't try.
I haven't written stories since early in high school, and those stories were not good. I still don't have any brilliant ideas, any plots or worlds I could create.
So I will turn to what I know.

I keep a journal. I don't write in it every day, and I don't write about everything. But I do write in it more often than not. It's personal. It's where I keep things so I can remember them. It's where I write things out so I can sort through my thoughts.
For the next year, I intend to sit down at the end of each month and read the entries of that month. Then I intend to write something. It might be a summary of what I've written that month, or a single memory which was brought forth by one of the entries. It might be a short essay on a topic which I mentioned. It might even be a story. I hope it won't be a poem because I have yet to write one of those that I've been proud of for more than a few weeks.
It's an experiment.
We'll see what happens.