Change in Plans (Big Dreams Blog Update #4)

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The Big Dreams Blog Hop is hosted by Misha Gericke and Beth Fred, and every month we gather to give updates on each of our crazy goals.

My crazy goal was to write X amount of completed stories, tally their word counts, and hit one million words.  Easy enough, right?

So when I joined in on this blog hop back in August 2013 I upped the ante and set an end date for the million words.  Sure, at the time Mother's Day 2016 (May 8th) looked reasonable enough in the middle of August.  With a 1000 days left, all I had to do was write 1000 words/daily.  Easy as pie, right?  Right?

In hindsight this was the stupidest thing I've ever done.  (Okay.  One of many stupid things I've done/continue to do. heh.)

I already talked about how scheduling really frazzles me.  But it's just a piece of the pie...(could you tell I have apple pie on mind?)

Ignore the funny three-lined border.

Speaking of pie...

But back to the chart.  The process is totally complicated, but it sums the hole I keep digging for my stories as I rest them in an ever-state of in completion.

Here's the thing.  For me it starts with patience.  No, my goal isn't to publish a book--I mean it is one day, but before that I'd have to write a story.

No agent or editor will give me the time of day if I pitched an incomplete manuscript, in other words a cardinal sin in the professional sphere of writing.  And that brings me to my first goal:  I want to finish a story.  To be more specific, my first full-length novel.  Sometime 2014 I will achieve this!  One sentence at a time until I hit 'The End'.  So simple and yet so difficult. 

Let me break it down in to six steps.  These steps kinda go down like this in my head:

"I just want to get it down now" she says.  Yeah.  My impatience is a dream-killer. (1. Patience)

"Then raise the word count.  All you gotta to do is write X amount of words every day for the next Y amount of days." (2. Word Counts and 3. Schedule)

SOMETIME LATER

"Not meeting those word counts, eh, and your deadline of Z is tomorrow!  Argh!  I rue the day I chose writing as a would-be profession!" -raises word count-

SOME MORE TIME LATER

"Okay.  Raising the word count didn't work.  Maybe I'm not meant to write, or at least ever finish something.  Fate must totally have something else planned for me. Thaaaat's it." -sits around waiting for said Plan-

"Where the heck is that Plan already?  Drat!  I could write this story, but it doesn't sound all that good anyways and nobody sane would like it--let alone love it.  Besides, is there really room for me in the publishing world?" -insert days worth of more inane reasons-

"Fine.  Fine.  I'll just write this other idea over here.  It looks way more manageable.  Yeah.  I like this new idea just fine.  Writing it will be as easy as pie..."

-vicious cycle continues-

Wrapping this post up, I have scratched out a deadline for the million words.  And it's already working magic.  I don't feel pressured to write 1000/daily, which works just fine with me.  The patience is a daily struggle though.  And I always want to jump ship on my current WIP for ad infinitum excuses.  This is when my fears and doubts are the most effective at blindsiding me.

I totally got this.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go have that pie.

Day...Not Giving up.

So this series was a bust.

Here I am, almost supposed to have my WIP finished and, more importantly, to have beaten my nemesis, the Internal Editor.

What happened?, you so kindly ask.  Let me fill you in.  So here I was prancing along, three days into this thing and then BAM!  Fear tripped me up.

Shutterstock speaks for themselves.

There goes my chocolatey-good resolve.  Funny thing, I actually eat a heck lot more when I'm disheartened.  It's my way to cope.  So for the sake of my waist size I've decided enough was enough...again.  See that's my problem.  I make these great speeches, and I like to think I have pretty fine dreams/goals, but I can never see myself through to finishing a lot of them (i.e. finishing a novel).

So what's my problem?  Fear.  Actually that deserves to be capitalized AND italicized, y'know, for dire emphasis.  FEAR.

Truth be told--and I'm baring my heart here (haha.  i like that kinda-pun with the picture above. i'm good. xD)--I'm scared to finish a story.  Scared I'm going to fail at writing, which FYI is the stupidest and most irrational excuse ever.

But then I asked myself what did I fear more? (Totally channeling Family Guy here.)

The conversation went like this:

Me: Okay.  This really has to stop.  I mean, what do you fear more--finishing a story and failing at its epic suckyness (<--not a word btw) or failing to finish at all?

(long pause filled with a black-and-white O MacDonalds rendition in my head)

Me: Yeah...  This should be a no-brainer, right.  Right?

So I'll probably continue to doubt myself, but in the meantime I'll also be writing.  And just as soon as I figure out how to put a word count widget on the blog, I'll post up regular updates of the trial and tribulations I'm sure to face while finishing my WIP.

Till then, toodles.

Day 4: A Stupid thing called Scheduling.

For the longest time I'd equated writing with scheduling.  The two words just went hand-in-hand.  If I wanted to write, I needed to schedule.  And that worked just fine with my bordering obsessive need to plan, in case you didn't know.

This image makes the whole planning thing look fun...

So writing became synonymous with scheduling.  This started around early 2009 when I finally outed my plan to pursue writing as a future career to my family.  God bless them!  No one laughed at me, and they're still not laughing after I'm writing this ~5 years later with not even one completed novel under my seriously rusty belt.

Along the way I'd realized that writing was synonymous with a bunch of other words, too.  Like 'awful', 'stressful', 'hair loss', 'insomnia', 'depression', 'impossible' and 'crazy hard'...  Okay, okay, that last one was two words, but you guys get the gist, no?

But then I realized what the problem was mid-2013, shortly before I started this blog back in August.  Scheduling.  This whole time I'd made this really stupid association that'd been holding me back.  I was writing to a schedule, keeping really ridiculous word counts, and even more crazy deadlines.

Now, in the as-of-now short defence for scheduling, I'm going to say that it does work if, and only IF, implemented properly.  I'll go into detail about this in a future post, but here's my quick spiel: *takes a deep breath* scheduling word count and deadlines are just fine, but make sure they're realistic on both fronts.  For instance, 500/day for 100 days would give you a 50K novel (which is considered an industry-standard full length).  That's totally manageable even around the craziest of schedules.  Of course, passion for writing in general and the story idea itself will help where 60 hour work weeks are in effect.

Where scheduling goes AWOL is when working with a really hectic  day-to-day word count or a weekend warrior-type target date, OR worse combine a combo of lengthy daily count goals + short goal completion dates.

Straight up example: Back in July 2010 I was working on a would-be werewolf paranormal series and I had this, like, really pretty schedule table in my outline document.  According to the pretty table, all I had to do was write 10000/day to finish the first draft of said werewolf story.

Yeah, that's not ambitious.  That's not even a "aw, isn't that cute?" naive.

Kids, we call that plain stupid.

Says JLaw my Internal Editor.

Have your laugh now, Editor.  One day...

WORD COUNT TO DATE:

6786.

Day 1, 2, 3... WRITE ON.

Should've posted this three days ago.

Phew.  Already three days. O_O

Somehow when you're writing time just flies...  Usually I'd have spent the weekend like every other weekend since 2014 started: complaining about the sheer impossibility of churning out ~6000 words.

Looking back now, I don't really know how I did it.  It's kind of like getting your eye brows shaped.  I hate the pain of the threading, but I know my brows gonna look slammin' afterwards so I tough it out.  Ask me in the car on the way home from said threading and I'll tell you "I don't know how I just did that".

It's like magic, where the main ingredients are sweat, blood and tears and not always sugar, spice and everything not sweaty, bloody, or teary-eye inducing.

Uh, yeah.  Where's the caution label?

So this page will document my journey through daily posts.  (At least daily from here on out.)

Word counts go beyond numbers.  What I'd really like is show just how much feelings (mostly crying.  Expect a lot of whining and crying) are in those cold hard numerals.

J

WORD COUNT TO DATE:
6219