"A Round of Words in 80 Days is the writing challenge that knows you have a life."
As I mentioned in my goals post for this round, I'm taking it a month at a time. My progress this week on August's goals is as follows.
Finish first draft of pseudonym's WIP2. I'm fairly pleased with the progress I made on the WIP last week; I worked on it for a minimum of 2 hrs/day, Monday through Friday. That said, it's become crystal clear that I need to adjust my expectations around when I'm going to get this sucker done.
I had a good conversation with a friend tonight via Skype in which she helped me realize that I'm being insane. When I think about being a full-time author (which is the eventual goal), I think writing 3-4 books a year seems like a really decent goal. But I'm impatient: I want to build my pseudonym's platform so I can start selling books and move to full-time author status sooner rather than later. So my plan for this year was to write and publish 3 books under pseudonym whilst continuing the editing work and coaching work...oh yeah, and working on some short stories and poems under my own name. What?!?
Well when you put it like that... Yeah, I was trying to be a full-time author and a full-time freelance editor/writing coach concurrently. Not to mention the small matters of selling my house earlier this year and house-hopping for 12 months, including 2.5 months traveling in Europe. So okay, I get it now. The idea of finishing two more books this year is crazy-cakes. Time to revise the plan.
The new plan is to have a beta draft of the pseudonym's WIP2 done by the end of October. I figure I have about 30K words to go, and I average 1,000 words/hr, so even after the initial drafting there should be time to go back and edit so that it's presentable to beta readers. Of course I secretly hope it'll be done before then, but I'm not going to stress about it. The main thing is to keep showing up to the writing every day.
Learn some German. Last week we learned how to tell time and started to learn food. Here is a picture my teacher drew in order to explain what a Huhn was. Please note that although it has a comb, it is projectile-shitting an egg. Have I mentioned how much I love my German teacher? A lot.
Get out & about on weekends (Friday-Sunday) for at least a couple hours a day. Achieved. Early Friday morning I caught a train with a classmate to Prague and got back on Sunday night, so in essence the entire weekend was "out & about." My favorite parts of Prague: gorgeous architecture, friendly people, relatively inexpensive, great public transport. Least favorite: the bees, the spider infestation, the hordes of tourists.
Participate in/keep up with the DIY MFA Conquer the Craft challenge. I continued to read the emails, but again did not prioritize participating. Not feeling bad about it though, since I made so much progress on the WIP.
Continue publishing two blog posts per week. I posted my ROW80 update and *thought* I'd written a new post for the travel blog, but I guess not. Definitely want to post on the travel blog at least once this week. Tonight, if possible.
How are you doing on your writing goals?
This is a blog hop! Click here to check out other ROW80 participants' updates.
I think a lot of authors have expectations of what they should write that differ from what they can actually write in real. Writing three/four books is crazy without working another full time job and travelling and learning languages and all the stuff you're already doing.
ReplyDeleteI've heard really great things about Prauge so it must have been really exciting!
Thanks for the moral support, Rosalie! Sometimes you just need someone to tell you you're being wacko, right? =*)
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