Accountability Tuesdays – Week 26

Two things to mention before I get to the heart of the matter today. First of all, it’s week number 26! That means I’m halfway through the year! And while I’m nowhere near where I would need to be to be on track with my million word goal, I’ve written more in the past six months than in the previous 2 years combined! But more on that later.

The other thing I want to mention is that as you are reading this I am packing up my last couple of bits and bobbles from the control room at work, chucking it all in a backpack, and awaiting the bus that will return me to camp where I’ll giddily await my plane home. My last plane home. That’s not to say that I won’t end up back out in Alberta for work in a few months or so, but for now I’m heading home with nothing on the horizon except spending quality time with my family and maybe enjoying a number of alcoholic beverages from the comfort of my back deck. Look upon me and be in awe, for I am officially ON VACATION!

Okay, that’s enough of that. 🙂

Health and Body Image Goal

I’ve been a bit on the ins and outs with this goal, unfortunately, but I’m still not doing too badly. As I mentioned last week I did, in fact, drag myself to the gym and try running on the treadmill. It wasn’t ideal, but acceptable. I figured that’s what I’d do until my stomach felt better. But then my stomach felt worse. I don’t know if it’s the actual physical exertion that’s bothering me, or if it’s the camp food (which, thank god, I won’t be enjoying any more of any time soon), or if I’ve been suffering from some as-yet-diagnosed condition inherited from my sickly parents (love you guys, really :P), but I’ve hardly been able to stand leaving my room in the morning and suffering through the bus ride to work, never mind exercising on top of that. Luckily, about two days ago, my symptoms seemed to subside and I’ve felt halfway decent since then, so here’s hoping all will be well when I get home and try to run around my neighborhood again.

All that said, I’ve still been managing to eat pretty well. I’ve had a cookie here, some pop there, but for the most part I’ve been eating decent food (or as decent as it gets on camp) and not too much of it. I haven’t weighed or measured myself recently because I doubt I’ve lost anything during my refusal-to-exercise days, but I’ve recently had an unusual number of coworkers tell me that I look like I’ve lost weight, so I’m just going to go ahead and say, “Woohoo! I look like I’ve lost weight!”

Editing Goal

I have a stupid, STUPID confession to make. I did try to get some editing done this week, I swear, I really did. But when I finally took out my tablet and opened up the files I transferred there for editing purposes, I discovered something idiotic. Of the four different word-processor-ish apps I have on my tablet, none of them open rtf files. Guess what format all my files are in? After two days of searching for an Android program that DOES open rtf files (for free, because screw that, I’m not paying for an app that I only need for a week) I gave up and admitted defeat. Apparently the world of tablets and smartphones does not believe in the existence of rtf files. So the editing will have to wait for this coming week. Grr.

1,000,000 Word Goal

I have been writing like a maniac this week, mostly due to my rediscovery of 750Words.com. I don’t know what it is, but I love just typing and typing and typing and watching the word counter go up. It’s addictive. Over the course of the week I’ve written blog posts, typed out a few scenes for Returning Hope, did a couple of writing exercises, and did a little bit of free-writing (i.e. writing whatever came to my head as it came to my head). Through all of this combined I managed to once again beat my best week score with a total word count of 16556. In addition to that, I’m happy to announce that I’ve reached a yearly total so far of over 165,000. Again, it’s nowhere near where I need to be for my goal, but it’s a heck of a lot more than I normally would have written, so I’m proud. Revel in my pride! Only six months to go to try and boost that total up as high as I can!

And with that said, I plan to spend the next several hours in the lounge at camp, with my feet up, reading A Dance With Dragons, and waiting for my final flight home. See you soon, Cape Breton!

Accountability Tuesdays – Weeks 10 and 11

If you read yesterday’s post, you know that I’ve had a bit of a rough time this past week. In addition to that, there was a bit of a snafu with the WordPress app on my Android tablet. Although I scheduled a few posts in advance for last week, as it turns out this particular app does not automatically upload scheduled posts directly to the website. Instead, it saves the posts to local storage, and at the scheduled time it then uploads to the website. This, of course, doesn’t work if the tablet is not currently connected to the internet, and since I scheduled updates for Tuesday on, and disconnected my out-West router in order to pack it on Monday night, the tablet never sent the posts.

Don’t give me that look. It was an honest screw-up that was totally not my fault.

So with that all established, this accountability post will be for this week past, and the week before, for which the post lay rotting on my traitorous tablet.

Health and Body Image Goal

Things got a little out of hand the past two weeks, I’ll be honest. I was still doing fairly good before I left work, although the exercising ground to a near halt because advancing to new Jillian Michaels videos nearly killed me. Seriously, what a jump in intensity between the first set of videos and the second. Jillian, you are a right awful witch.

This past week, of course, has had it’s issues, and the husband and I have found ourselves at the wrong end of quite a bit of take-out and fast food. I’m feeling sufficiently bad about myself though, don’t worry about that.

I haven’t weighed or measured myself, because quite honestly I don’t want to find out that I inadvertently began heading back in the wrong direction. Straight back, gritted teeth, and let’s just move on, shall we?

Editing Goal

As previously mentioned, I’m seriously considering just not bringing this one up any more, and we’ll see if anyone even notices. Although the realization that I’ve gone almost a quarter of the year and not set pen to paper yet on this one has me reconsidering my approach. Amongst other organizational decisions, I’ve established that I’m going to have to set aside specific time for this one. I’m thinking possibly that this is an “on-the-bus-on-the-way-back-from-work” thing, and once early morning daylight catches up to Northern Alberta again, it can be an “on-the-bus-on-the-way-to-work” thing as well. Wish me luck on that one!

1,000,000 Word Goal

Week 10 wasn’t too bad, with a total of 4254 words (179 of those words for the blog, the rest for Parallels). Week 11 (again, understandably) was weaker, at 2795 words (912 of those for Parallels, the rest for the blog). Not too shabby, all things considered, but I really would like to boost that. I’m not really sure how, or where I’m going to find the time, but realistically speaking I’m unbelievably behind for the full-year look-ahead, and I’ll be extremely disappointed in myself if I don’t at least get half a million words. Wish me luck on that one as well.

And now that I’ve consolidated two fairly disappointing weeks, I’m going to go attempt to fix up the scheduling for this week’s posts (which should have been last week’s) and then I’m going to bed, thank you very much.

I Don’t Even Have Time to Manage!

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

32. Time management systems for writers

I know I’ve said this before about other topics, but if there is one thing that I should not be commenting on, it’s ‘time management’. The very existence of a thing known as ‘time management’ eludes and confuses me. At my very best I’ve been known to accomplish one or two things a day that I had actually set out to do. Most of the time I accomplish only the herculean task of clothing and feeding myself, and rolling around on the living room floor with the baby.

That said, I know that time management is (should be?) very important for writers. We have to be able to find the time to pluck out x-number of words a day, plus keep up to snuff on our social media, plus deal with all the other aspects of everyday life, which for many of us means a day job. It’s just not something I’ve ever gotten a hold on. I write when I can, and when I can I write a lot. That’s about the best I’ve been able to manage.

I’m aware that there are many apps out there for both Apple and Android products, as well as many websites such as LifeHacker that were created for just this sort of thing, but somehow I don’t even manage to find the time to look into these things. How sad is that? I can’t find the time to look into time management. And despite my own failure to initiate change, I do suggest that anyone looking at working on their time management skills do a little research on Google…trust me, there are tons of aids out there if you can muster up a little initiative.