It's that time of the month again.
UPDATE DAY!
This one's gonna be a real quick post, as I'm hardly going to scratch the surface of what I'd like to talk about. This month has really opened my eyes to something. I've been writing consistently since July, mostly accomplishing this by setting daily word count goals. So here I am hitting these daily word goals but something's been off lately. I don't always feel like I've written at all on some days, even if I know I have the words down.
Then it hit me.
Confidence. It's a big word (but we all know it could be bigger, like the 26-letter Floccinaucinihilipilification). I'm gonna take a deep breath with this next one: I'm not confident in my writing.
There I said it.
I'm not confident in my writing, and that usually moves on to translate to other parts of my life. For instance, one of my longtime hobbies--though I'm not sure you could call it that. Procrastination would be a better fit, especially when I'm browsing through Goodreads instead of actually writing an essay, or studying for an exam. Yeah, ahem.
Anyways, one of the 'things I like to do' is read book reviews. And, of course, this lead me to want to write my own. But for the past two years I've been putting it on the back-burner using excuses like "well, you're reviews are not gonna be all that funny and witty" or "someone else has already said that, so what's the point?" OR (my favorite) "Psshft! who'd wanna read your review?" And this voice in my head sounded so darn familiar it took me a long while to realize it sounded like that sassy Internal Editor of mine.
Which comes to my point. There's a difference between word count and word confidence.
What's word confidence? It pretty much speaks for itself, but I'm using it here to capture that intangible feeling of accomplishment. For the past 5 months I've been successfully hitting my word count for at least 90% of the time, but I was never satisfied because I've been lacking word confidence. That is, not being happy with what I've written even if I have crashed through my word count goal.
December will be spent trying to find this word confidence. I don't really know if I'll succeed, but I'm willing to try.
And while I do this, I can promise I haven't forgotten my million words. Right now I've started a new project and I'm about 14K in. I'm proud of what I've accomplished this month and most of that word count happened this past week. It might not be as much as I could have had at the end of November, but I'm pretty darn proud of what I've got.
Until December then.
