15 Days ago today, we started an ambitious campaign that was absolutely breathtaking in its scope: a campaign to start a reality tv show featuring writers, agents, and publishers so that the world could get an inside peek into the realities of what it takes to bring a book from conception to publication. We needed $1.25 million dollars to do it – a daunting amount. But we set our doubts and fears aside and we launched it anyway.
Where we are now
15 days in, things are not looking good. We have managed to get just 2 donations for a total of $30. We have 25 days to reach our final goal of $1.25 million dollars. I have struggled with discouragement and even though there were positive signs, I wondered if we’d made a mistake. Maybe there wasn’t a market for this. Maybe other people weren’t as interested in this as we are.
The Transformational Moments
In the middle of my doubts, messages of hope began to filter through. Two days ago, I was viewing a series of videos by The Art of Revolution. After all, that’s what we are after – to start a revolution. And as I watched, I understood why we were failing. We weren’t telling you our stories. We weren’t sharing with you why it matters to us that this happen.
And I realized we needed to flesh out our mission, craft our message, and deliver our manifesto so that you would understand why this matters to us – and why it matters to you.
My Story and The Mission
I’m undoubtedly the ringleader of the gang. The project was my idea, and I connected the team together. So it’s only right that I go first in sharing my story.
When I was 4 years old, my mother married a man who made me feel powerless and helpless. He made me feel like nothing I had to say mattered and that nobody was listening to me. Three years later, my mother took me for a drive and asked me to share my story if anyone had ever hurt me. I told her my story, and it seemed to have no affect. She didn’t act on it.
Maybe it would have ended there, but my stepfather cornered me when I was alone and confronted me about telling my story. He warned me if I did it again, bad things would happen to the family. I believed him – but I also saw in his eyes fear. He was afraid of me. He was afraid I would share my story. That’s when I knew that I had to share it, and I had to continue sharing it until someone listened.
It took me another three years to find someone to listen to my story, but I did. I was able to change everything just by sharing my story. And that’s what 40 Day Writer Reality TV is all about – about helping you to change everything by sharing your stories. This is our mission – to help restore power to the powerless by teaching those who feel they have no voice to reclaim their voices and make themselves heard.
Because your story can change things. You sharing your story can change everything. And 40 Day Writer Reality TV gives you a shortcut to sharing that story – to making yourself heard – and to reclaiming your power.
The Power of Your Voice
The powers that be are pretty satisfied with themselves right now. They believe that they are in control, and they do not fear you because they think they have you convinced that you can’t fight them. They fear that one day, someone will come along and wake you up to the reality that you are powerful, and you do have the ability to change things when you raise your voices and make yourselves heard. You can stop them from taking advantage of people. You can stop them from destroying lives. You can stop them from taking what isn’t theirs to take. All by sharing a story.
Your voice is powerful. But they have been successful in their campaign to quiet you. They have bombarded you with messages of hopelessness. They have flooded the news you read and the stories you see with messages that you don’t matter, that you can’t change anything. So you don’t vote at all because you think it doesn’t matter how you vote, or you vote for the candidate that stinks the least because you don’t believe you have other options. And things go on the way they’ve always gone on. Until now.
We are here to tell you that your voice matters. That you do have the ability to change things just by using it, and to encourage you to contribute to this campaign and to spread the message. We want you to wake up to the reality that you have more power than you think you do – and to encourage you to use that power for the benefit of others.
Why do I want you to become writers? Because writers lead the leaders. Writers have the power to shape and influence not only the current generation but generations to come – and our time is now. This is when we stand together and we tell future generations that they matter. We shrug off the messages of hopelessness and powerlessness and we reclaim our voices so that never again will a generation believe the lie that their voice does not matter.
Our Manifesto
We the story tellers of our generation refuse to allow our voices to be silenced. We refuse to allow our lives to be lived in the shadows of others. We stand united in the purpose of helping one another to make ourselves heard, to recognize the inherent dignity and worth of all life, to value every story, and to treasure the contributions we each have to make to the tapestry of humanity.
We are the listeners and we are the story tellers. We are the ones who shine lights in the darkness and who throw spotlights on wrongdoing so that it may not go unaddressed. We speak for those who cannot speak for themselves, and we stand up for those who are too weak to stand for themselves. We do not allow the faces and the voices and the pain of others to go unrecognized or forgotten. We are sometimes afraid, and we are sometimes discouraged, but we do not allow our fear or our discouragement to allow us to forget the reasons we fight. And we do not quit.
Join us?
Become a #40daywriter. Support our cause. Share the message with others. Become part of shaking up the establishment. Become part of setting captives free. You have great things within you, and together we can do more than we could ever do apart.