Ultimately, the rules are mine, so if I break or bend them, that’s on me.
Here we are on the 3rd of March, and the Romance novel for February isn’t done. But am I calling that a loss? No. And here’s why.
While I had the general idea for this novel in my head, I didn’t have it written down, and that contributed to my lackluster performance in writing it. But once I forced myself to properly outline it, like I should have from the beginning, then I was able to make it work, because I had plot beats mapped out, and that made the extra stuff I formulated along the way fit into the grander scheme.
Secondly, I couldn’t focus. Or maybe it was I welcomed any and every distraction that meant I didn’t have to write. Facebook? Twitter? Some random article that was of little to no consequence for my life? Got a notification on my phone? Gotta take care of that right away. Never mind that I had been typing up my latest sentence, and knew where I was going, and it would be difficult to get my mojo back when I returned to writing. There’s a reason I gave up my regular Twitter for Lent, and have largely stopped checking much of FB for now. And, admittedly, other than feeling a bit disconnected (as I’m not seeing the news links I’d get from the various news agencies I follow), it has saved me a lot of time, and gotten me going at least somewhat better because of it.
The third major contributor to my poor productivity during the earlier part of the month was what I call my “Hermione problem” in that I really needed to sort out my priorities. There are a number of things I do every day/week, and while I continued to make sure I wrote every day, I sadly kept putting it off toward the end of the day, when I was tired, and when, if I wanted to get to bed at a decent hour, I didn’t have a lot of time to write. I almost always chose not to write much, even when some momentum started, and I could have gotten at least a little closer to the goal, and not leave me so far behind. But I didn’t push myself. I even allowed silly things to get in my way, calling it “serendipity” that on Saturday, just 6 days ago, that hitting 5,555 words was meant to be the stopping point for the day. Meaning, if I was to finish by the end of the 28th, I’d have to write basically 15K a day for 3 days.
But herein lies part of the problem with that: I’ve done that many times before. To some degree, I thrive on it sometimes. The deadline has always been one of the biggest motivating factors for me when it comes to writing, and it can be addicting to not only have that euphoria that comes from giving myself over to rapid writing, but crave it. I can plot out all I want, but there’s something about the inspiration that happens when I’m typing for my life that is hard to deny.
For what it was worth, I wrote pretty well on Sunday, and had closed a respectable gap, if not quite the 15K I would need to stay on this increased pace. But toward the end of the night, I got some news that derailed my productivity (news that isn’t really my story to tell, so I won’t be expanding it, at least not in a public forum such as this). It slowed me that night, and has had fallout that bled into Monday in particular, but still will be with me at least through tomorrow, and emotionally, well beyond that. (I imagine this probably has generated enough clues to piece together what might have happened, and if you care to follow up with me in some way, that’s fine. If, however, you try to guess in a comment on this post, I either won’t approve if you’re new, or will delete if you’re not.) I’m thankful I got this news as early as I did, but it still cut my productivity, even if it also helped narrow my focus to some degree as well. I could punch through and keep going.
When I really get going writing, I can get up to 2K an hour, and there were several hours where I was getting there. But as Tuesday marched on (ha, because it was almost March!), it became apparent that no matter how I tried, I would not finish by midnight. It didn’t help that my wrists, even partly up my arms, started to hurt. I realized that as long as I completed the novel before I went to bed, in what I considered the “conscious day” of it all, it would still count, but once it became clear that it would mean staying up until 4 or 5, and that was dependent on the “writing 2K per hour that whole time” strategy, and how much that would screw me over for any kind of decent Wednesday, a new idea occurred to me: February, at 28 days, is at least 2 days shorter than any other month. If I took an extra day to finish, that wouldn’t be so bad, and I could still count it. Then I could go to bed, get a relatively decent amount of sleep, and cross the finish line, and call it all good.
The problem with that strategy was, I had slept poorly for a few nights, and while I got a chance to get somewhat caught up, it wasn’t enough. It also didn’t help that I had to get up earlier than usual to take my son to an appointment before school. There was also the fact that, since it was in a new month, I had put off the majority of my obligation to the piece up for critique in my writing group. I wasn’t going to blow off completing that, so I worked on that in the afternoon, cutting into writing time. But after the meeting, I was going to go home and write and finish.
Except I was yawning like crazy during the meeting. Crap. It would be a long night, because I hadn’t gotten to write as much before the meeting as I had hoped. And that would throw me off for the next day, when my daughter would have a half day of school, so it would make taking a nap all the more difficult.
You see where the problem was? That I was caught in a cycle of being tired and not being as productive as I wanted? But, maybe, that by extending the deadline, a lot of the motivation to properly finish had drained away? I’m doing everything in my mind not to drop this novel, or, for that matter, call it a “loss” in my mind, because if I do, the desire to keep going the rest of the year will go with it. But I also know that I can’t feel right properly starting the Mystery for March if I don’t have the Romance novel done, too. (I’ve technically started, as I have the title and Chapter 1 header on the first page.)
Oh, that reminds me of something else about this novel that I almost forgot about. It was supposed to be about 2 guys who had thought they were straight eventually realizing when dared to kiss that maybe they liked each other, and were going to explore that and pursue it by the end. Except, for whatever reason, the plot didn’t want to go that way. I have to now come up with a new title (as the one I chose referenced the queerness of the story), and that, I think, has been an additional obstacle in my mind keeping me from finishing. It’s a silly one, but it’s still part of it all. (I still plan to use the title for some other project in the future, because I think it’s too good not to utilize at some point.)
For the 50K total, I have less than 8K to go. I’m giving myself until the end of the weekend, because I still need to work on my sleep, and so much I’ve put off until March, or that has popped up because that’s part of life, has stood in the way of getting it all done. As I’ve said in the past, I’m too stubborn to fail. But I also understand that I need to give myself a little grace. I’ve written around 40K in the span of a week, and that’s nothing to complain about. I know there are thousands, maybe millions, of people who would do just about anything for that kind of productivity. (Keep in mind, I know a lot of this is crap writing. I don’t claim to be writing a masterpiece in this first pass.)
Once again, the ultimate judge of whether I “succeed” or “fail” at this round of 12 Months, 12 Genres falls to me. And right now I choose to keep moving forward. Are there distractions? Yes. Am I doing my best not to let them get to me? Also, yes. I’ll get Novel 2 of the year done, and get caught up on Novel 3 so I don’t repeat this again. I know I said that after January. And maybe this is where I should stop trusting the optimistic side of my personality, and instead listen to the realistic side, and face what’s really going to happen. I guess only time will tell. I have 4 weeks to finish this novel. Never mind that there’s a half day (or maybe no school, I don’t have the calendar in front of me), and the start of spring break at the end of the month. I won’t be able to count on writing all day if that’s what it comes down to. So I’d better not let it come to that.
If you’re at the bottom, you probably don’t need this, but the TL;DR version: learn from my mistakes, and don’t do what I do. You’ll thank yourself in the end. And if I can eventually change my ways, so will I.