Hey all! I meant to post last week, honest I did. Tim and I both got fairly sick over the Christmas break and I was still recovering last week and a lot of things slipped my mind as I was sleeping and using all the tissues in the known universe.
In lieu of missing New Years Day proper, I want to talk about resolutions and goals. I've never seriously created a list of New Year's resolutions for a few reasons, the primary ones being that I think it's a little silly that people wait until New Years to make new goals but also because I'm not very good at sticking to my goals and I don't see the point in making a list of things I know I'll never look at again. By and large, I still hold those opinions but this year I've actually made myself a little list of realistic goals I want to meet this year.
In August last year I decided that I'm going to write this book for reals. I've been rolling the idea around in my head for two years and if I'm going to do it then I ought to just get going. As you all know, I participated in NANOWRIMO this last November which was a good jumping off experience for dedicating myself to getting this thing written. December didn't follow up very well with guests and holidays so I'm looking, once again, to reapply myself. I have a strong suspicion that this first draft will end up with a word count higher than 50,000 but not being completely confident in that and not having the faintest idea of what it would end up at, I'm committing myself to hitting 50,000 words or the end of the story by March 6th. Why March 6th? Well, I wanted this goal to be reasonable. I know I can, on most days, write three pages in a day without greatly disturbing the rest of my schedule. So, 50,000 words divided by my average word count per page times three - planning on writing five days a week with weekends for catch-up as needed - put me at March 6th.
I crested the New Year with 20,000 words so that's 30,000 to go - a bit of a daunting number, honestly. But I've heard before that the key to accomplishing goals is the break them into bite-sized pieces. I don't feel like I have to move heaven and earth to get three pages written a day so I'm much more likely to do it and it's been going well so far! Ideally, I'll get the story finished before the start of summer [if it takes longer than 50,000 words] and then I'd like to have the first edit completed by the end of summer. That will, in many ways, be a bit more intensive than writing the first draft but at that point I'll be transferring my written draft to a word program which is a process with editing built into it and editing from there should go faster.
The idea of actually accomplishing all of this is at once exhilarating and terrifying. I mean, I've dreamed of writing a book for ages and if I manage this it'll only be the second time I've ever finished a story since high school [and that one doesn't count for so many reasons]. It's exciting to get close to your dreams but there's also that sense of "what then?" Obviously there are answers for that in this case. Namely, a billion more drafts before I consider trying to publish it, but I'm trying to keep myself from hyperventilating this year. Lets add that to the list of resolutions.
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