An update on my writing goals

Sometimes you have a good night and you get a bunch of writing done and you decide that’s enough for tonight and go to hang out with your husband… and he’s in the middle of taking apart a laptop and the pile of wire and bolts on his lap indicates that he probably doesn’t want to hang out with you at the moment. Soooo, you go back upstairs and write a blog post, that’s what you do! 😉

It’s been a busy/crazy last few weeks with family stuff bad (health badness for some beloved relatives) and good (my brother from FL came to visit for a week!) and my husband and I just wanted to crawl into a hole and ignore everyone for a few days. I hate admitting when I feel like that because I don’t want my family and friends to not think I love them, because I do, but something what the doctor ordered is nothing, you know? I feel like just admitting it is better than being all “I have to wash my hair” or making up an excuse. We are just being anti-social. It happens.

So we had a most excellent Friday night (husband watched baseball, I puttered on the computer when I should have been working because I am a bad, bad Hillary) and an even better Saturday with a long leisurely day by the pool with no drama. We are going with pretty much the exact same plan for tomorrow. Our expression for days like this is “No one is the boss of us” which perfectly describes the rare treat of having to answer to no one.

Tonight was more baseball for husband so I went to get some writing done. It’s been very hard to find time to write with all the stuff going on the last few weeks and I was pressed to even get my day job work done so it was nice to sneak some time to do it. I’m terribly behind on my goal for the year, 3,048 words behind to be exact. But I’m not sweating it because I’m confident it’ll get done.

I’ve been reluctant to set an exact goal but I think I’m going to call it. I’m going to finish this draft by the end of August. This may be a tall order but I actually think this section I’m on right now (and have been on for many weeks now) is the hardest part because it really sets up all the dominoes and the mystery and then the rest of the book just goes zooming on. Also, two of the biggest sections coming up have already been rewritten so I am (perhaps naively) assuming they will need less work than the straight first draft stuff. I hesitated to set an exact goal before because I have no ability to estimate how long writing things take and always set impossible goals but I think this goal, while challenging, is not impossible. So, we’ll see.

So, where are we, you ask? Potato, will you do the honors?

Does anyone else get an uncontrollable desire to push those stray pages back into the pile? Just me then? Hmm.

These may seem like an insane goal for someone who is 3k behind on her current goal but I have decided to aim to reach at least 132,500 word (preferably 150,000) before the 1st of November. Reasoning behind this is, firstly, December is always the worst month for me in terms of eBay and I don’t usually get much time to write so I can’t really count on it. Secondly, I’m going to hit a minimum of 50K words in November no matter what because of NaNoWriMo so it will make the NaNo victory that much sweeter if it also caps off my write goal for the year. This doesn’t mean I won’t keep writing once I hit the goal, but it seemed like a nicer way to cross the finish line and takes the pressure off for the holidays.

Getting to see Potato hit 100% at the same time as I 100% NaNo? That would be awesome.

Of course, work gets busier and busier as it gets closer to the holidays so the more I get done now… well, let’s just say it would be nice to get ahead.

I was going to try to write a little more tonight but I think I may have just hit ye olde wall of exhaustion so I might as well quit while I’m ahead. May you all have a lovely weekend!