Many years ago, a friend of mine found himself (through no planned action) face to face with Uri Geller. Now, my friend’s attitude towards spoon-bending and similar psychic phenomena could be best described as “violently sceptical” (or as he himself would put it, “It’s all a load of bollocks”), but he was in company, and felt bound to politeness. On the other hand, he is also a man who carries honesty to a fault, and so did not wish to pretend to a belief he did not feel. Casting around for some common ground, he recalled one fact about Uri that he could talk about.

“I understand you write novels, Mr Geller,” he said. “I would like to be a writer myself.”

Uri gazed straight at him, and said what he later described as “either the most profound thing I’ve ever heard, or the stupidest”.

“You wish to be a writer?” he said. “Then, you must write!”

My friend told me that story several years ago, and it’s always struck a chord with me. I consider myself a writer, I enjoy writing, and yet I write too seldom. The idea sloshed around at the back of my head, only to be brought back into the forefront by this awesome Cracked article. Like a fire in my head, the thought echoed around.

“You must write!”

So that is pretty much exactly what this New Year’s resolution, and this blog, and this site, are all about. Every single day, from the 1st of January 2013 (or today, if you count this), I will write something. A few quick ground rules:

• Fiction or non-fiction, both count.
• I don’t have to write an entire thing, but I do have to write a distinct section of something.
• Rewriting counts as writing. (If you don’t think so, then you either are not a writer, or are a terrible one. Sorry.)
• Writing for work does not count as writing. (Unless what I write goes to an audience outside work, and even then I’d be doubtful.)
• Anything I complete that I’m not going to try to publish elsewhere will go up here.
• Regardless, every day I will blog here a short (possibly single sentence) description of what I have written today.

So what will I be writing? Anything and everything, judging by past experience. I’ve a list of websites I’d like to write stuff for, and if that doesn’t work out it’ll go up here. I’ve a novel in third draft with a long list of overdue rewrites – getting that into a form to actually do something with would be awesome. I’ve got outlines, ideas and starting chapters for three other novels, which I should definitely be putting down onto paper and giving life. I could write short fiction, weird meta-analysis of the media, movie reviews…anything.

If, for some reason, you actually want to follow along on this, then I’ll be pushing the daily updates out onto my Twitter feed, along with any completed work that goes up here. If you’re only interested in the actual completed stuff, that’ll be going out on the Facebook page. And if you have any ideas for things I could write – let me know.

So it begins. Wish me luck!