Home » Posts tagged 'Goals'
Well, it’s over.
It’s done.
I didn’t win NaNoWriMo. I didn’t even meet my personal goal. But I was determined that I was going to make it to 15k this evening, or fall asleep trying.
And I made it.
Cheers all around.
Word Count: 15005
Feeling: Relieved, Exhausted, Ashamed
(Coming soon: What I learned from NaNoWriMo. Stay tuned!)
I took a brief pause in feeling like a heel for not getting any work done on my novel this week – and thereby pretty much ensuring that I wouldn’t meet my NaNo goal – to read a conversation between Nathan Bransford and Sarah McCarry.
The very last comment makes Sarah my favorite person:
Sarah: The best advice I can think of is…that the one thing everyone who finishes a book has in common is that they got it done. The circumstances of people’s lives are so different–I don’t think it’s useful to say “you must write for at least fifteen minutes every day” or “you must achieve a certain word count weekly”…Some people write a book in a year and some people take a decade, or their whole lives; some people write every day and some people don’t write at all for months. There’s no one right way to do it. I think the key is finding the story you want to tell, which no one else can do for you, and finding the best way to work with your own brain…
You can read the entire conversation here.
After a brief wallow in the “Woe is Me” sludge, I finally matched my book up with its genre, worked my way through some major plot catastrophes, and crossed the halfway mark for my (new) word count goal.
And I made cupcakes.
Again.
(I’m noticing a trend here.)
Word Count: 12765
Feeling: Limp
Spent quite a bit of time on the phone with my Lil’ Bro today brainstorming about the plot of my novel.
(He is not participating in NaNoWriMo, and is therefore not stressed.)
(He’s also sitting home with a broken foot, and has nothing better to do with his time than to discuss possible ways to destroy the earth with his charming sister.)
Ergo, much more many words.
FINALLY broke 10,000.
Yes!!
Word Count: 11137
Feeling: Triumphant
1,677 words today.
Ha!
Word Count: 8860
Feeling: Rather proud of myself
Why on earth am I blogging about my (mostly failing) attempt at NaNoWriMo? I am well aware that my journal of this experience is hardly the most interesting of all the NaNo posts on all the NaNo blogs in all the NaNo world.
…so what’s the point, Sam?
I blog because it forces me to write.
If no one reads my chronicle of this experience, it doesn’t matter.
I know it’s here. And that some imaginary person somewhere is expecting it to be here. And that if it’s not here, then I’ve let that person down.
It’s not about letting myself down. I let myself down all the time.
I break promises to myself all the time.
I am the queen of falling short of goals. If I’m the only person holding myself accountable, well then, baby…you can kiss that goal goodbye.
It’s about that imaginary reader who is obsessively checking his blog roll, looking for my update, waiting to hear about my writing today, cheering me on to my goal.
I don’t want to look like an idiot or a quitter in the eyes of that imaginary person. So I keep writing, and I keep blogging.
(I also keep making cupcakes. I should start a side business.)
If it weren’t for this journal, these daily NaNo updates, I would have quit long before. (Like, the second day, when I realized that everything on my schedule that week was double booked and I had to write 1k words a day!)
So what if it’s not the most brilliant blog post around! If it keeps me from quitting, it can be as dry as Miss Melba’s toast and I wouldn’t care.
Word Count: 6458
Feeling: Defiant
Inscriptia 