Several weeks ago, I wrote about treating your writing like a mortgage. You owe yourself a daily word count and effort to contribute to your success.
Well, I spent five weeks doing great with it. At one point I even exceeded my set pace. With 2541 words ahead, I had given myself two days worth of vacation. Which was great. However, after that five weeks a few things happened in my life that caused me to slip.
A few rough events and I let it get to my head. I stopped writing for 4 weeks. This blog post being the first thing I’ve written for myself outside of work in a month. I keep a tracker of my word count, making sure I adhere to my 5-year goals.
So I counted up how far I’d fallen behind on the 5-year plan. Wasn’t pretty. The four weeks of negligence, and minimal writing, has left me 21,365 words behind my set pace. That’s from being at a 2,541 word surplus.
I’m sharing this with you for multiple reasons. 1) While I understand that the events of the last few weeks have been stressful, it’s no reason to slow down. In fact, this should have lit a fire under my ass to write and work harder than ever. 2) I had a human moment. A series of setbacks that put me on the mat. 3) This is to hold myself accountable to where I currently stand so I can pick myself up, start the catchup process.
Now I’ve got weeks and weeks of writing to do, and I’ll have to exceed my goals significantly to make up for the lost writing. I’m still holding myself accountable for that 21,365 debt.
That’s it. No big motivational speech.After five weeks of kicking ass, I slipped. Now it’s time to decide what I’m doing about it. Just facts and next steps. It’s because you can’t talk about how amazing you’d be at something to not do a thing about it. You keep moving forward. You fight. You write.
THE WRITER'S CONQUEST 