Six Hours In a Day Challenge—Updates

Here are the updates for today’s challenge. (I realize these challenge titles are dumb. I kinda don’t care if they get me writing and keep me writing. I take motivation wherever I can get it!)

But, uh, yeah, this hasn’t gone well so far today.

3:53 pm at 0 hours, 0 words

That’s not supposed to happen, right? I blame the cold weather; it’s stealing all my mojo. Or it’s because I’m out of milk and can’t make cocoa. Or something.

I’m not exactly done for, but here’s the truth. I have only seven hours until I have to go to sleep to get eight hours and get up in the morning all ready to get back to my schedule as I thought I would do. But with breaks and the other stuff I have to do tonight, I’m not going to be able to get six hours without—ah crap. :D I just realized quite suddenly how bad this is. Excuses, excuses, excuses. :o I do recognize them. Or I do now.

I’ve been fighting going back to staying up late and just making up the sleeping time with naps and living a fairly unstructured, unscheduled life, because my daily word count spreadsheet makes it very clear that my most productive month was when I was getting up at 7 am and writing first thing, with a goal of no WIFI until I’d hit 2500 words. I didn’t always get the 2500 words before lunchtime, but I did it enough to make February 2013 my highest word count month since I started publishing. I wrote over 50,000 words that month. But now that I’m thinking about it, I know I hit 50,000 the year I won NaNoWriMo. (2010. I have a bad memory for dates! I had to go look at old emails to figure this out.) Anyway, back then I had a part-time day job and wrote at least something almost every day. I just looked at the old spreadsheet and my high and low word counts are all over the place and in no way line up to any particular day. So that would have been no schedule and I was just as successful then as I was this past February.

What does this all mean?

I don’t know.  :D

Well, that’s not quite true, because I know I didn’t succeed at this challenge and that I’ll be writing late if I want to at least get in a few thousand words before I call it a night! And I do want that, because I don’t want to give up on the one million words. :)

 

 

Ten Six Hours In a Day Challenge—Do Over

Well, since getting ten hours was a bust yesterday, I thought I’d try again, but this time go with six hours and try to work my way up to—ah, you know what? This isn’t really necessary. If I write for six hours in one day and start doing that regularly, I’m really not going to care if I ever work my way up to ten hours in a day of writing. Really. I’m just not going to care. :D

However, six hours of writing is a good goal today because I’ve done it before and although it’s not easy for me, it’s also not too much of a stretch and it’s not too late in the morning to get a good start on that goal and actually reach it before five-ish. Because I have television to watch* tonight. :D

(Yes, it does appear I’ve thrown my schedule out the window. Not gonna lie. I hate it, so I keep finding myself trying to find ways to work around it. I’ll have to make some kind of decision on it soon, despite my commitment to stick to it, but I’m waiting to see if this is just me rebelling against myself… Also, tomorrow I am going to try to stick to it, regardless of my feelings on the matter, just to give it one more week of a real trial run. Mondays just aren’t good days for my schedule because I almost never get up in time to get to work by 7 am. Shoulda probably thought about that when I made it.)

I want to write three hours before 1:00 pm and then three more before 5 pm.

So, off I go.

*Not to derail this post completely, but Grimm came on Friday night and I haven’t watched it yet! I don’t like to miss Grimm, but when the kids are gone, they don’t like me to watch it without them. Of course, I could fake it (watch and then rewatch), but they’re getting good at reading me. So, probably better all around that I usually get busy enough that I don’t mind waiting until they’re home.

Also, I tried the Helix pilot (which is currently free at Amazon if you’re interested) and eh, I wasn’t impressed. It entertained, but I definitely feel resistance about making myself watch another episode. So, although Helix has a good premise, I doubt I’ll watch more unless someone tells me it’s gotten really good in later episodes.