Accountability Wednesdays: Week 18

Before I get started today, I have a quick question for my fellow WordPress bloggers. Are any of you having problems with lost comments/notifications? Since April was such a busy month with the A to Z Challenge and all, I think I may have missed this problem until just recently. Basically what is happening is that I’m getting notifications through my iPhone app (for instance, “So-and-So has left a comment on your post, Such-and-Such”) and I’ll glance at them just to see what they are and then forget about them for the time being because I find it too cumbersome to do a lot of comment replies and the like on my phone. So later, when I’m on my computer, I’ll go to WordPress to reply to the comments, but it won’t be in my notifications. It’ll be on the post, if I go to my blog manually, and it’ll be in the “Comments” tab of my account dashboard, but it won’t be in the list of most recent notifications. Since that notification list is what I normally use to interact with comments and the like, I now find myself in the frustrating position of having no idea how many comments I may have completely neglected to reply to. And since I’m the kind of blogger who likes to respond to everyone who interacts with my blog, this is really really bugging me, but the only way I can know now is to go to that “Comments” tab and scroll through every single one to see what I’ve missed, which I totally do not have time for.

So, in conclusion, I’m asking if anyone else has experienced anything like this, and also issuing an apology to anyone who may have visited me during the A to Z Challenge and not gotten a reply. I swear I made every effort to interact with everyone, so if I didn’t reply to you, this is why. Sorry!!

Moving on…

Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.

Okay, so two weeks ago I said that I had a plan and that it was going to be put into motion within the following two weeks. I’m going to go right ahead and say that that did not happen. However, hear me out. Last week I got a C.T. scan done on my abdomen. This Friday I have a doctor’s appointment to talk about that scan. I’m really, really, really hoping to get an answer, or at least a better guess, about what might be wrong with my guts. And since, for the past year or so, exercise has tended to make my stomach problems worse, I figured that it couldn’t hurt to wait until I get to that appointment first. I’m not sure what I’m going to find out (if anything), but it would be nice to get an idea about what’s going on before I put my guts through that extra strain. Hopefully we’ll finally have some real idea about why I get the way I do, and I’ll leave the appointment with meds or a diet plan or something that will help avoid the issues, thus making exercise less of an anxious ordeal.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.

Things have slowed down a lot this week now that the A to Z Challenge is over. I’ve been keeping up with Facebook, but that’s about it. Trying to keep in touch with all the awesome bloggers I met in the last month, but I also kinda wanted a week of silence after all the business during the challenge. I’ll do better next week, promise. ^_~

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

This seems completely illogical, considering that I just got myself moving on this goal, but I’ve put it on hold for a short amount of time. The reason is that a friend of mine has given me her manuscript to beta-read and I want to give it my full attention. To be reading someone’s manuscript while also editing my own, I just don’t think that would be kosher. She’s relying on me to give her honest notes about the state of her manuscript, and I want to make sure that I’m able to focus on that without my mind wandering over into the problems that I have with my own. I’m hoping to get the reading done and the notes off to her as quickly as possible, so check back with me next week for this goal.

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

Beyond everything else, I was really hoping to get a good, high word count this week, but it didn’t really happen that way. There were a few distractions, such as a birthday party that took a giant chunk of my day away (hour and a half drive down, two hour party, hour and a half drive back), a few crappy days (miserable, rainy grossness makes it impossible for me to concentrate), and a variety of other things I had to do (take the daughter to playgroup, house stuff, major grocery runs, etc), and when you add in the fact that I’m just sometimes lazy as all hell, I only ended up with a grand total of 4297 words this week. The good news is that when I happened to glance up at my grand total for 2014 thus far, I found that I’ve surpassed a hundred thousand! My official number at the moment is 103,552 words since January 1st. It definitely would be nice if it were higher, but still..that’s over 25,000 words per month so far, so go me. ^_^

Accountability Wednesdays: Week 17

A few things before I move on to the accountability portion of this post:

A big congratulations to all of my fellow “A to Z Challenge” participants who managed to make it through the entire month! Some of those letters were damn difficult, but we made it! I had a blast with this challenge, met a ton of new blogging friends, and gained a respectable number of new followers, so I guess it served it’s purpose. 🙂 Since I did a theme, and a lot of people enjoyed it, I’m going to post a link list of all my challenge posts tomorrow, as well as a couple of links to some of my favorite new bloggers. Don’t forget to check it out!

The other thing I want to mention is that by the time you are all reading this, I will be just finishing up my first (and last, hopefully) CT scan. The previous procedure that I had last month evidently didn’t show anything outstanding, so I’ve been scheduled to have my innards x-rayed. A new experience, and hopefully a helpful one. Wish me luck, everyone!

Now, on to the main event…

Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.

I won’t say it was an overwhelmingly good week, by any standards. As previously mentioned I put my exercise plan on hold in favor of getting through some other stuff first (see: aforementioned CT scan, amongst other things). So no, I didn’t exactly overwhelm myself with physical activity this week. I have been doing a bit better when it comes to things like portion size, but that’s mostly because I’ve been strangely lacking in appetite this week. On three separate days this week the only meal I ate was supper, plus a snack at nighttime. It was odd. Maybe my mind is too busy to bother with hunger signals.

Anyway, all in all it was neither a good week nor a bad one, and we’ll worry about this particular goal more next week, okay?

Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.

If I’m going to be perfectly honest, I slowed down a lot this week, but it was still a pretty good one. Coming on the end of the A to Z Challenge got me a little worn out, but I still managed to keep up a presence most days. What amused me the most this week is that I found myself being mentioned in several tweets linking to “daily report”-type websites who mentioned me. The sites don’t seem to be the type that are going to send me waves of new followers or anything, but it’s still pretty damn cool to be mentioned. 🙂

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

I promised that I was going to do something toward this goal this week, and I kept that promise, dammit! 🙂 It wasn’t an enormous amount of work, but I took some important steps by crossing off every item in the “invisible typos” list from my beta-reader, and skimming through for “weakening” words, which I have a very bad tendency of using on a regular basis. On top of that, I took the time to transfer my manuscript to a separate “final draft” Scrivener file to make for easier editing and the ability to look back at previous drafts. It sounds like I just copied and pasted, but trust me when I say that it was somewhat more complicated than that. Point being, everything is all neat and organized now, so I really have no excuse not to go through and start making my final changes.

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

The other promise that I made last week was to write something every single day. I did not keep that promise. Boo. I almost did though! I don’t even know what happened, honestly, but somehow I just completely forgot to write anything yesterday. But that was my only screw-up, I swear! I didn’t write too much useful, to be honest, but with a couple of blog posts and a few pages of notebook nonsense, I managed to come up with 4769 words this week, which is significantly more than the last two weeks combined. Here’s hoping I’ll be able to keep it up this coming week.

Accountability Wednesdays: Week 15

I’m not going to sugar-coat it…it’s been a bad week for goals. Honestly, I don’t even know where the week went. It feels like it should be Saturday or Sunday, not Wednesdays. I don’t know what it is exactly, but it feels like my days are about ten hours long, max, and even if I sleep a full 8 hours a night that still leaves six hours unaccounted for. How is that possible? I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the hubby bought me Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD for my birthday and I’ve been more than a little obsessed with it this past week. Maybe I’m just losing my mind.

Anyway, we may as well get this over with.

Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.

It’s big confession time. When I began this goal at the beginning of the year, I weighed myself to see where my starting point was, and made a personal note of that number. This morning I weighed myself again, mostly out of curiosity, and found that not only have I GAINED five pounds on top of that starting point, but I am now officially one pound heavier than my husband. He’s not a huge guy, so it’s not like it’s an enormous deal, but he does have about 8 inches in height over me, so it is a little bit of a big deal and I’m not happy with it.

This morning before I started writing this post I was actually considering putting this goal on hold for a month or so so that I could focus on the more important Goal #3, but now I feel like that would be a bad idea. I knew that I wasn’t doing well on this goal – I’ve been lazy and I never stick to a healthy diet for more than a day or two in a row – but I really wasn’t expecting to find out that I GAINED weight, and now I feel horrible. I am officially at the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life, which is approximately 50 lbs heavier than I should be. NOT HAPPY. NOT HAPPY AT ALL.

In related news, I’ve been in to my doctor to talk about my blood work. While it wasn’t terribly revealing, it did tell us that there is definitely inflammation somewhere in my body, and I now have an appointment for a CT scan on the 30th to see if they can find the location of said inflammation. I doubt that this particular issue (and it’s eventual treatment) will have any affect what-so-ever on the weight-loss end of this goal, but hopefully it’ll help out a bit with the “become healthier” part.

Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.

The week started out half decent with some blog community interaction and some tweeting and bumming around on Facebook. But the past three or four days have been truly abysmal. I have a major backlog of A to Z blog posts to check out from my fellow participants, and I don’t think I’ve replied to a comment on my own posts since Saturday or so. Not good, not good. Again, I’m truly disappointed in myself.

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

At the beginning of this past week I was genuinely confident that it was going to be the week that I finally got some work done on this goal. I thought, at the very least, that I would get through the list of “invisible typos” that my beta-reader made for me. You can probably tell by the “tone” of my wording that this did not, in fact, happen. It did not happen at all. That’s why I was considering putting Goal #1 on hold for a while, so at least I could focus a little better (maybe), but now I don’t know what I’m doing. I think I might need to hire a time management expert. Or maybe I just have to take my laptop and leave the house for a couple of hours every day. I don’t know. Suffice it to say that this past week was abysmal, and I’m still very disappointed in myself.

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

And finally, the goal that is usually my saving grace only serves to cement that inner disappointment that I keep prattling on about. This week, despite doing nothing at all toward any of my other goals and, truly, doing nothing productive at all that I can think of, I also managed to write bugger all. Over the course of an entire week I managed to force a grand total of 718 words, an average of barely 100 words per day. Truly, truly, truly disappointed.

On the upside, I’ve already beaten last week’s word count with just this one accountability post, so I’ve got that going for me. 😛