I’ve decided that keeping a post as a running commentary on the month’s writing might be the best way to actually have some accountability to my goals.
Continue reading “April 2023 accountability”Tag: Accountability
March 2023 accountability
This is the first of what I’m planning to be a monthly series. The posts will center around how the writing is going for me, and what my level of output is.
Continue reading “March 2023 accountability”Plans for the year—2022
I’m just pasting this from my year in review post so I don’t forget I’ve already planned this out. :D
Here’s the plan.
1) Start a 1,000 words a day streak. That would get me about 183,000 words before the end of the year.
2) Focus on finishing each book quickly instead of jumping between projects.
3) Work on more than one project at a time. This doesn’t contradict number two, because it is based on working on the same multiple projects each day. I have two pen names. I also have three types of stories under one pen name (novels, short stories, and my experiment with a serial). I also have different series. I will settle on a way to choose which projects get worked on and then I’ll work on them until they’re done.
June 2022 progress
This is my first monthly progress post in a while. I thought I was about to get back to productive writing in November, and I did for a while, but then some life events happened that threw me back into the place where my ability to write creatively disappeared again.
I lost both my father and an aunt I was very close to in June. My father passed after multiple strokes, the first of which we thought he had come back from remarkably strong. It was a false win. Less than a month later, he was hit by an even bigger, more devastating stroke, and in the end, I had to let him go even though I wasn’t ready. Dad died without life insurance, a will, or any beneficiaries listed for any of his accounts. This has created a lot of financial issues that will have to be resolved, but I’ve done what I can on that at this point.
Things are settling now and I am ready to try again to get back to my plans for 2022.
Emotionally, I still feel out of sorts and not quite able to draw on whatever part of my brain it is that drives my creativity, but I don’t think it’s ever productive after a certain point to sit around and wait for it to get better.
I have big goals for July. Even if I fail, I will succeed as long as I try, because that will mean I’m getting better.
I am surprised that I got any words in June at all but I did putter several times and end up keeping alive a streak of no zero or negative word months for 2022.
Today, I’ll try to start a 1,000 words a day streak for the rest of July. I have a better than average chance since this is a Camp NANO month and I’ve set a goal that will break my record for words in a month. The record is 57,249 from April 2016.
June words: 335
Year in review—2021
Oh, boy. 2021 was not a great year for me in a lot of ways. I feel like I escaped it by the skin of my teeth, and in some ways, I feel like I’m still stuck there, trying to get out.
I wrote that first paragraph before things went bad in 2022, but I do think I finally escaped 2021 at the end of the year. I started off 2022 in a way that feels good. It didn’t last, but at least the issues of 2021 didn’t linger past their expiration date.
If there’s anything I learned from the mess I made of the year, it’s to not wait when I’m stuck in a book.
Looking back, I can see in February 2020 I was having an issue with a book that didn’t get resolved until I sat down in 2021 at the end of the year and made myself just claw my way through the material until I had something that worked. A lot of the stuff I was unhappy with ended up in the end product. It wasn’t bad. I was the problem. And the hardest truth is the one that says if I had just tossed all those words back in 2020 (multiple times if necessary) and started over from any point that felt like a good place to restart, I could have finished several more books instead of staying stuck.
2021 was my worst year for production of words since I started keeping track in 2012. It edged out 2020 by 1,515 words.
Two bad years in a row could be a death knell for my career unless I can improve dramatically in 2022.
The first half of 2022 has been just as bad, but I do still think I can recover.
Here’s the plan.
1) Start a 1,000 words a day streak. That would get me about 183,000 words before the end of the year.
2) Focus on finishing each book quickly instead of jumping between projects.
3) Work on more than one project at a time. This doesn’t contradict number two, because it is based on working on the same multiple projects each day. I have two pen names. I also have three types of stories under one pen name (novels, short stories, and my experiment with a serial). I also have different series. I will settle on a way to choose which projects get worked on and then I’ll work on them until they’re done.
I’m not going to post my month by month word counts for 2021. Too much trouble, and no one cares to be honest.
I published a novella, started a serial, and published a short story in 2021.
2021 words: 34,134
My Kindle Vella story has the lowest profit for any story I’ve published
Yeah, I just did the math for the earnings per word for my Kindle Vella story and although I knew it was bad, I hadn’t realized just how bad.
As of this moment, my Vella story has earned me $0.01833520 per word. Not per month, but for all time. I’ll bring this up again in a few months and see if things still look as pitiful.
Admittedly, I’m doing no advertising or other promotion of the story, because I have other priorities, and I always intended this just to be a way to get me writing regularly again, but the sad fact is, I have a lot of projects that I want to do, that will also earn me significantly more (I can’t even stress how much more) money than this project has been earning me.
I wanted to finish this in a reasonable time frame, but I just don’t think it makes sense in any world to do more than the bare minimum for this until I’m ready to actually sit down and finish it wholesale because I’m ready to publish it as a book.
Which, thank goodness I fully plan to sell this as a book later. Otherwise, I would feel like it was a lost cause and put it so far onto the back burner that I might never get around to picking it up again. I have a series I’ve let that happen to. I’m not happy about it, because I like writing the books, but I don’t like writing the books more than I like writing the other books in my other series and they make me a lot more money, so I’ve kept putting off that next book. It’s been about five years at this point.
I really need to spend more time writing.
And that’s another thing. This year, I’ve decided (as of this moment, to be honest) to stop saying I need to write faster. Because yes, on some level I do need to write faster and I wish I was better at that, but the true, underlying, number one reason I don’t write “faster” is because I don’t spend enough time writing.
So it’s time to own up to that and start talking about it in a way that is honest with myself.
Yes, there are days where I spend plenty of time writing and maybe I don’t write as much on some of those days as I wished because I’m not a 1,000 words per hour writer. But. And it’s a big but. Those days don’t happen as often as the days where I just do not spend enough time writing and end up with a word count commensurate with that effort.
Ah. Honesty is hard to swallow sometimes. And this post is a bit of an accountability post for me.
All that said, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my 2022 goals even as late as it is into the new year (quarter one is done, for goodness’ sake). I’ll be back with a post about it when I’m ready.
False starts and reconfigurations
I’m recovering from a few false starts this year, the first of which began in November of last year. I’m trying to settle into writing again, regularly, after a long stretch of not writing much at all.
I still don’t know with absolute certainty what caused that, although I have several theories. I worry that it’ll happen again, but since I can’t be sure of the cause, there’s not a lot of point to that worry. It happened, and now it’s time to move on. That’s the way of life more often than not anyway.
Despite the false starts, I’ve continued to improve. But we all know the saying, two steps forward and one step back, so I’m not surprised by the path I’m on.
I’ve made a few changes. I decided to ditch writing every day in favor of writing every weekday.
I don’t like schedules, but I realized I really need some regular downtime.
If I was facing burnout, and that’s just as possible as my other theories, I need to guard against future burnout. Since most people I know and interact with have weekends off, I chose to have weekends off, too. I need to visit family more often, spend more time with friends, and that’s a good time to do it.
So far, I have loved it. To a degree far greater than I expected. So I’ll be keeping that going forward.
But yes, I have had a little more trouble getting back into routine writing, but I’m working on it.
This is my accountability post to say that although I’m working on it, I’m still a ways off from true success and I need to keep working on it.
My intention is to be a prolific writer. Prolific writers keep writing. :)
Well, back to timed writing!
My 2022 goals are off to a slow start. The plan is to publish something (novel, short, whatever) every month. I’ve lost some momentum into this new year because I got sick early in the month, and I’ve had a hard time getting moving again.
Last night, after the umpteenth time waiting too late to start (even though I stay up late sometimes, I haven’t been lately, and I haven’t had any willpower at all left once it gets late, so no matter how many times I tell myself I can just get started anyway, it doesn’t happen).
So, new plan.
I want to finish a book, but since “finish the book” isn’t really working for me as a daily goal, today’s is simpler: write 3,000 words (which will probably finish the book). So many mind games. It’s hilarious. But whatever works!
I’ll do 20 minutes 4 times, take a break (or not, depending how I feel), then repeat this a few times. That will get me between 3–4 hours of writing. Which might be enough time to get to 3,000 words.
(I want to write about 90,000 words a month this year, which is insane for me, but I’m seriously tired of dragging out the time it takes to write all these books I want to write. If I really want to write them, I’m going to have to speed up! And there is absolutely no good reason why I can’t write that many words. I am not physically incapable of it, and I have enough ideas to last the rest of my life and beyond. Mental hangups just do not count as real limits. I can do it. Once I break through this barrier, it will get easier. I just have to keep pushing until I crack the wall.)
So, anyway, that’s the goal today. 3,000 words. I’ll report back at intervals, much like I used to do, and keep myself accountable to getting these 20 minute sessions in.
Update #1
I finished the first set. 694 words and 1.333 hours (20 x 4) and I came it at 521 words per hour overall, with one session short actual writing time of about 4 minutes because of a phone call interruption. So it could have been better but probably not by much.
I did a lot of backspacing. My typing is atrocious, but this was mostly me having trouble coming up with a next sentence issue.
I’m going to try to do better with the next one. Think for two seconds before I type or something, I don’t know.
I’m still planning for two to three more sets, but I’m going to have to have a break, which I will need to keep reasonably short. So good luck me with that.
Update #2
Finished the second set and ended up at 980 for the day. I threw in an extra five minutes on the timer so my numbers would round better. :) 2.75 hours, 980 words, 356 wph. Not gonna lie, I’m disappointed with the wph number. This was new material and shouldn’t have been so hard to get up to speed with.
Getting stuff out the door before Christmas and a new year’s goal
Finished my story. Now on to publishing, writing an episode for the serial I’m doing on Kindle Vella, and finally getting back to editing those novel chapters. Trying to do it all today. Time will be short because of a family obligation but I’m going to try.
I wrote over 2,400 words yesterday. I will have to look at my spreadsheet and see when the last time is that I made it over 2,000.
I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I’m trying to get my 7 day total up to 16,800 before the new year and keep it there. That’s a 2,400 words a day average, although I’m not talking in averages anymore since they really don’t fit my writing/work style.
1,200 words an hour—Attempt #2
Even though I didn’t reach 1,200 words an hour yesterday, I did finish one of the things I needed to finish writing. \o/
Today, I need to finish a different thing, and do some editing of a lot of chapters. Typo hunting, continuity, clarity, that kind of thing. I’ll be doing my best not to be tempted to change anything else, because that way lies madness. :-)
Results—
Not even close.
I think, and this is me being proactive here, I’m going to pause this particular challenge and come back to it when I’m working on a different project. This one is a little tricky because I have to stop and look up information a little more often than usual (from books in the series that I wrote quite a while back).
1,200 words an hour—Attempt #1
I didn’t finish what I wanted to finish yesterday (or the day before) so I’m building some accountability into today with a short challenge.
1,000 words an hour is usually a stretch for me. I’m not a really fast typist. I only come in around 60 words per minute when I’m pushing myself. Sure, that’s 3,600 words per hour typing speed, so it’s not that slow, but that is not writing time. I write much, much slower than I type.
So a 1,200 word an hour challenge is just the thing to try to push me past my internal critic and get some real writing done. Even if I fail, the push to write faster will probably help get past critical me. :-)
See you later for an update. :D (To this post.)
Final results—
I never made it to 1,200 WPH today. My best session was 441 WPH.
I’ll be trying this again, probably tomorrow. I have some reading / typo hunting to finish first, but if I make it through that, I’ll be writing again.
As needed, when needed
The writing is going well. The blogging, on the other hand, is as dead as one of those mice my stray cat keeps leaving in front of my door in exchange for “real” food. :D
I’ve started innumerable posts that I end up leaving in draft stage. So I guess that’s that. If I needed the blog, I’d be using it more. I’m not even making journal entries in OneNote, or diary entries in any of my many notebooks scattered around my desk.
I’ll take what I can get right now, and that’s the fiction writing. If I figure out what I want to write here, I’ll come back and start regular posting again. Otherwise, it’ll be as needed, when needed, and that’s that.
Daily writing – Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2020
Wednesday, I wrote 1,754 words.
Daily writing – Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020
I wrote 190 words on Tuesday, and more than half of those were on paper with a pencil. :-O What?
I used to write a lot on paper, but I really don’t work like that anymore. This is what the streak has driven me to. :D
I was out yesterday evening and tired when I came home and tried to do my words at the computer but I kept nodding (I did stay up until 3 am the night before) so I gave up. I said, nope, not doing it tonight. Don’t care about the streak. Just can’t do it.
Then I put away my computer (I was in bed), and before I knew it, I’d picked up my little notebook that I keep with me almost everywhere, and my pencil, and I’d started writing. It came so much easier than it had been coming on the computer that it took me a minute tops to write enough words to keep the challenge part of my daily writing streak alive.
In fact, I spent fifteen minutes or more staring at the computer trying to get something to come to me to write next, and yeah, I wrote 80 words, but it was hard. I was just too tired.
Only apparently I wasn’t.
So here’s my little tip of the day: If the words aren’t flowing, pick up a pencil and a notebook and try that. You might be as surprised as I was that what had felt hard a minute before felt effortless a minute after. :-)
Now, I’m ready to start my three hours of leisurely writing and get my first 1,000 words so I can get that cup of hot chocolate I mentioned a day or so ago. Yesterday was not a good day for writing, so I didn’t, but today I have no other plans and I’m kind of hoping for TWO cups before the day is over. ;-)
(Also, I changed the title format again, and left a note in Sunday’s post that explained it.)
Daily writing – Monday, Jan. 27, 2020
Today I finally got back to the novel. I wrote 1,622 words on it.
I also think I found my new routine for a while: a 3.5 hour block in my calendar for writing and a timer set for 3 hours of leisurely writing. ← Leisurely is the key word there.
I don’t like pushing but I do it all the time. It ruins the fun of writing for me. It’s time I stopped that. I have to write the way that makes writing the most fun and the easiest for me. Easy writing is fun writing. (Not theme, craft, blah blah blah, I’m talking process—the actual act of writing.) I need writing to feel easy. If it doesn’t feel easy, I procrastinate and I don’t write.
I am done pushing to write faster. I write at the speed I write, and that’s that.
And now to tell you how I really did it. :D
Although all of that mentioned above helped me today, it’s not what got me to sit my butt down and stick it out today. It was just the method I chose to get me to a cup of hot chocolate. :)
Yep. Hot chocolate.
A little more than a month ago, I cut out most sweets from my diet and that has been working great. But I’ve been missing hot chocolate something fierce during these dreary winter days this week. (I had specifically forbidden hot chocolate because it’s a weakness of mine, and one cup becomes two and then I’m drinking far too much hot chocolate every day.)
So I revisited the idea of my “no sweets before 1,000 words” rule and decided that I was willing to self-sabotage the no-sweets rule for the benefit of my writing.
I made a list of things in OneNote that I thought would help focus me.
==> New rule: Hot chocolate after I write 1000 words! But only if I get there. Then I can sit down with my hot chocolate and get the rest of my quota.
It worked. :)
What is the quota, you ask? (Or maybe you don’t because you don’t really care. If so, why the hell are you reading these blog posts? There really is nothing here for you if my process doesn’t interest you at all, because that is what the vast majority of my posts are about. :D)
The quota is the number of words I need to get to meet my 2020 financial goals, based on the historical value of a word in dollars. I’ve been calculating that in a spreadsheet for years—earnings per word published. It’s a little complicated, but it’s a fun exercise for me. I happen to really love playing with numbers.
That quota is 1,616 words average. (2,000 today and 1,232 tomorrow work just as well as 1,616 every day. It’s an average. But the easiest way to hit the average is to get as close to 1,616 as I can every day.)
So I have a quota based on financial goals, and I have a goal based on how many words it would take to make me feel prolific. They’re not the same and probably shouldn’t be, because I’d hate to think I had to be highly prolific to meet my financial goals. However, being highly prolific is something I aspire to.
As for the “no sweets before 1,000 words” rule, I was following this rule back in April and May when I had my first two consecutive 50,000 word months. It’s a powerful motivator, because I love sweets just that much. Hot chocolate was often the sweet I went to the minute I had reached that 1,000 word mark even back then.
And sure enough, I started this rule yesterday evening and although I didn’t write enough words to get chocolate yesterday, I found myself making writing my priority today just so I could make sure I got my hot chocolate this evening. :D
The rule is simple: write a thousand words and get a cup of hot chocolate. That first 1,000 words is the big hump. I had toyed with making my rule more strict and tied into my daily quota, but decided against that.
Small wins are great motivators. :-)
As an extra incentive to keep trying for the bigger, more aspirational goal, I can have a second cup if I make it to 4,000 words.
The second cup hump is bigger because if I’m going to self-sabotage, I’m going to have to earn it. :D
Now, off to bed. :)
Daily post – Jan. 25, 2020 – Saturday
I finally gave in tonight and turned to another story to get some words in after barely wanting to look at my novel. I kept putting off even doing the 172 words I need to keep my daily writing streak alive, so switching off to something else was about the only way I was going to get to go to bed tonight. :)
The good news is that I’m not broken—I didn’t have any trouble getting in some quick words on the other story. I’d like to finish it soon anyway, so it was nice to revisit it. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be in a better frame of mind and ready to set in on the ending of the novel.
I think the big thing stopping me from moving forward with that one is that I have some written-out-of-order stuff to merge and I just don’t want to do it. That’s not how I usually write, and when I do, it’s a pain in the butt to merge it all, and I can’t really move on until I do, hence avoidance and procrastination. I will prevail! Eventually. :D
In the meantime, I wrote 233 words. The streak continues. ;)
Daily post – Jan. 23, 2020 – Thursday – Part two
I made it past the hump. I didn’t make a lot of progress with the word count, because I deleted two chunks of story that I no longer need and that knocked down my document’s word count. Since that’s how I track my daily word count, I have ended for the day at a net 266 words.
Considering I started the day with a big ol’ negative word count, I’m pretty happy that I not only covered the deleted words, but added enough to get me into positive numbers. :D
The book is moving along. I’m still not sure how much longer the book is going to be. I do know I tend to slow down as I get to the end, while I’ve heard (and talked to) a lot of other writers who speed up as they get to the end. Don’t really know why they don’t slow down, or why I don’t speed up, but I don’t really care. I just think it’s interesting.
Anyway, I’m pleased with my progress. Didn’t find a single mistake in the entire first two chapters (but I’ve already read through them a few times since I began this book) and I made only a few minor additions. And I love it. The book is hitting all the right spots for me. That’s important to me, for the simple fact that as long as I love this book, I don’t give a flying rat’s ass what anyone else thinks about it because it makes me happy. ;D
(Not gonna lie, I’ve loved every book I’ve written. Every last one of them. I can’t be objective, but I don’t really have to be. That’s not my job. I just write them to make me happy. That is the only objective I have when I start any book: make me happy.)
Now, off to sleep, and hopefully, I’ll get on a roll with this book tomorrow! :D
Daily post – Jan. 23, 2020 – Thursday – Part one
As I said in my last post, I seem to be feeling better today (those sleep habits coming into play again) so I’m expecting myself to get some real writing done today.
Luckily I woke up feeling good today and hopeful and even a little inspired so maybe I’m getting there. :-)
I’ve had a little visit from project block and normally I’d just move to another story for a while but this book is expected and I haven’t finished it yet. Since I gotta make a living, I need to work on this book, and lo and behold, that has added pressure to the writing that I don’t need—or deal well with.
I have to trick myself into changing my mindset and that’s actually pretty hard to do—although not impossible.
I’m also really not in the mood to write. And when there’s no one but me telling me I have to do this, well, we all know self-imposed deadlines and threats and promises of rewards are very unlikely to work for long. :D
They help, sometimes, but they’re no magic cure.
I just do not like writing when I’m not in a writing mood. I get bored with reading too sometimes. Like right now, I keep starting books, getting about a chapter in, and dumping them. Nothing satisfies, and I can’t concentrate on a book long enough to care.
Some of these books would probably have been perfectly fun to read, and I expect I’ll come back to some of them later. Some of them just aren’t for me and I’ll never read them. Those I’ve already deleted. Why bother keeping a book I don’t like? I’m sure not going to force myself to read them later. I couldn’t even force myself to read bad books in high school when my grades depended on it. Luckily, I was good enough at bullshitting my way through those reports and papers to do okay anyway. :D
Here’s a funny story. One of those books was The Hobbit. It’s a fantasy classic, but I just could not get into that book. I’ve never read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, although I liked the movies very much. I’ve tried, don’t get me wrong, but ugh. It was torture! But I love fantasy. I’ve read The Belgariad (ten books, plus extras) too many times to count. Those are some of my most read books.
I start books, put bookmarks in where I stopped (if it’s a printed book), and go back sometimes years later and finish them. Sometimes I never finish them. And lots of the time, once I restart, I have no idea why I stopped reading them.
I don’t go back and re-read the stuff I’ve already read. I just pick up where I left off because I usually remember everything once I’m a few pages in again. Lots of people can’t do that. But, I’ve said it before, people are different. That’s one of my superpowers. :D
Right now, I’m barely reading. I’m just not in the mood for that either.
I think I’ve said it before, somewhere probably buried within the site, that reading tends to be my bellwether for where I am creatively speaking, and if I’m not in the mood to read I’m almost never in the mood to write.
But if I gave in to my moods all the time, I’d be—wait. I kind of am poor at the moment. :D
The sad fact is, I don’t really care. When I don’t want to write, I don’t write.
Getting past that is indescribably hard. I’ll suffer a lot to keep from doing things I don’t want to do—a lot more than most people would be willing to suffer, for sure.
I binge write mostly. The same way I binge read. I want to establish a routine that will help me write more, but I only want that because I want to be more prolific. :D It’s kind of a pie-in-the-sky dream but I am doing things to help it become a reality.
My daily writing streak is now 170 days long. That’s an improvement over my former record of 122 days.
My January word count is 19,676 words (publishable only, anything I deleted hit my word count as a negative). So I’m currently at my second best January word count since I started keeping up in 2012 and that’s with nine days to go in the month.
Small wins. :D I’ll take ’em.
Right now I’m in the situation of needing to write when I’m really not in the mood and my natural inclination is not to care enough to do anything about it.
I spend a lot of time trying to get past that by introducing other things to my writing that I find exciting or motivating: challenges, goals, rewards, talking myself around, blogging until I’m sick of it, running numbers in my spreadsheets, doing what-if analysis, imaging what could happen if I did this much writing or that much publishing, etc.
The goal of the daily writing streak was to help me get over the hump of inertia when I lose interest in writing for a while. That has worked on one level, but not as much as I’d hoped.
Yesterday, I had a little fun running some numbers to assess the effectiveness of the streak.
Over the 169 days of daily writing, I wrote 125,202 words.
Over the 169 days prior to the streak, I wrote 132,296 words.
BUT the 169 days covering the same time last year (and the year before and year before, etc.) shows the streak has probably made a difference overall.
Over the previous years’ same time periods, I averaged 35,225 words less than the current streak period, and not one of those periods had a higher word count than this one.
Yay! I’m glad to know it has helped at least in that regard.
Now if it would just make me want to write more than I want to write, since I totally want to write more than I’m writing! ;)
There’s probably a reason December and January are usually my slow months. And to be honest, I’ve actually done really well this year. I’m currently on track (extrapolating this month’s daily word count to the whole month) for this to become my 21st best month out of 91 months of tracking even if I keep trudging along and don’t improve any more than I’ve already improved. That’s nothing to sneeze at. :)
It just goes to show that for those of us who find routine difficult and boredom a mind-killer (and a will- and motivation-killer too) that you don’t have to accept that as the status quo. You can still improve if you find something that keeps you moving, even if you’re feeling like you’re moving through molasses (it happened, 1919!).
What I need is a big exciting idea to pop into my head and save me from this bored-with-everything phase I’m in. ;-)
Truly, if I had a choice, I wouldn’t write on any story right now. I’d just hole up and do absolutely nothing productive whatsoever.
But I will keep trying to move forward and get it done anyway. :D
Because there’s poor, and then there’s poor. I’d rather avoid the second one. ;)
On that note, I’m going to go stare at my book and write the next sentence and see where I end up today. :)
Since I’d rather not revisit this long post later, I named it Part one and will post my end of the day accountability post in Part two.
Daily post – Jan. 22, 2020 – Wednesday
Short night. Went to sleep at 3 am, woke up at 8 and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I’m up early.
Today I’m coming at my writing from the angle of no schedule at all. I haven’t decided if I’ll use a timer. I guess it depends on what happens when I sit down to write. :-)
I’m going to try for a large word count today because I want to get as close to the end of this book as I can get. I can’t honestly tell you if I’m getting close or not. But my last one was well over 100k words and I just do not want that for this book. So I’m holding out hope that my muse isn’t going to do that to me again. Maybe futilely. :D
Today I’m going to write, copy edit some early chapters, follow no schedule at all, maybe use timers, maybe not, finish my cover, finish my taxes, order a washing machine, and probably take a nap at some point!
Now, off to get this day started and I’ll update later.
And…
I wrote 210 words just to keep my streak alive thirty minutes before I went to bed. So, yeah, I’m writing this bit on Thursday morning. I tried something a little different yesterday, but it failed hard. :)
I’d call this project block, but what it really is is project boredom. ;-) My characters aren’t telling me what they want to do next and what they’re doing now is boring the hell out of me. :D
The good news is I feel a lot better today, so I think I’ll find the discipline to sit down and get my characters to make some decisions about what the hell it is they’re doing. ;-)
If they annoy me too much today, I’ll chop off the last two or three chapters and tell them they better rethink that last big decision! I’ll put the screws to them. If they want this story told, they better start talking. :D
Daily post – Jan. 21, 2020 – Tuesday
I wrote 225 words today. That was all this morning. I generally hate dictating fiction, but I did do some dictation into my phone this morning and that’s how I logged those 225 words. Saved my daily writing streak, so that’s good.
I did no fiction writing after that at all. Never even looked at my book.
My routine is still far from being settled. I haven’t actually been able to sit down at 9 am for a three hour block of writing one time since I started this. I haven’t been able to sit down at 2 pm for a three hour block of writing since I started this, either.
Routines are hard for me. Like, quitting coffee hard. I’ve quit coffee about once a year for the last twenty-five years. At the moment, I’m drinking three cups a day again. :D
I know why routines are hard for me. I’m really hoping I can find a way around that this year.
On the other hand—because there’s a second one, so why not use it—I kind of think I’m already going to have to change something, because this is just not working. If I don’t change things when they’re not working, I risk falling into a funk and burying my head in a book and then I’m reading three books a day again and doing nothing else. :D
It’s one of my failings, this tendency to binge things, or become obsessed, or addicted, whatever you want to call it. It’s why I won’t let myself watch anything on tv right now that I haven’t already seen. I have to finish this book I’m working on. I started it early last year, for goodness’ sake. In fact, my earliest backup of my file is dated January 17, 2019. So I have officially been working on this novel for more than a year. Yikes!
I finished some other books between then and now—a giant novel, some novellas, and short stories—but I want to finish this one, and the sooner, the better.
This kind of goes back to my post about the need to maintain a high level of interest in what I’m writing so I don’t bog down. Well, it’s official. I have bogged down, and despite some really awesome moments in the writing of this book, I have lost interest and it’s time to get this one out the door! Can’t do that if the damn thing isn’t finished. So I have to finish.
I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it here because there are too many posts on this site to go through to get to it, I am not a finisher by nature. I get bored. I want to move on. It’s a chore to finish things. The one thing that helped me start finishing books was to not know what’s coming in the story. Once I know, I’m done. The book is toast. I’m fighting every step of the way to get to the writing, and yuck. I might as well be digging a ditch somewhere on a cold, rainy day.
I hate writing on those days. HATE it.
I have in-progress books that I started years ago. One is from 2015. I absolutely plan to finish that book. I write a few thousand words on it every year or so.
But that right there is why I want to start writing more. Not because I actually want to write more, but because I want to have written these books. You can’t have written a book if you don’t write the damn book. :D
Look, I said in my last post that I don’t actually like the process of writing very much. Really, though, it’s more nuanced than that. Sometimes I hate writing. Sometimes I love it. Sometimes I’m not even sure how I feel about it.
And sometimes I get absolutely sick of trying to pretend it’s all fun all the time. Because it isn’t. Sometimes I just want it to be over. So I can move on.
And that means I don’t want to sit down and get started and write. And sure, I could make myself—oh, wait. Yeah, no, I can’t. Because if I could, I’d have finished this damn book months and months ago.
What I can do is keep coming at it from different angles until I find one that tricks me into getting started again, and then ride it to the end. That works. But it does tend to take time and effort and I often make a fool of myself trying one thing or another and failing again and again. I’m used to that. People will think what they will about my methods and I’ll just keep pushing and trying until I get there.
:D
I keep thinking (maybe falsely) that if I can ever get myself to write more on a consistent basis, it will start to feed on itself: my interest levels will stay higher, boredom won’t set in, and I’ll find it easier to finish.
But I can’t get there without getting past all the other stuff first.
I keep trying. Because persistence matters and what else am I going to do—get a “real” job?
LOL.
I don’t think so. ;)
Tomorrow, I’ll reset, and I’ll try again. 4,000 words or bust! :D