By the time you are reading this I will have been home from my shift out West for approximately one full day, which also means that I’ll have been unemployed for one full day. Yes, my job has ended once again. I was aware that it might not last very long because of the nature of the work we were doing, but I was a bit surprised to have been laid off so soon. I expected to get at least one more month out of it, as evidenced by the flight I had already booked and now wont get reimbursed for. But I’m not bitter. No, really, no bitterness here at all.
Hopefully I’ll get back to work sooner rather than later (if anyone knows of any commissioning jobs starting up soon, for the love of god let me know), but in the meantime I’m going to look on the positive side, which is that I’ll have time to focus on my goals for a little while.
Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.
I have mixed feelings about the success of this week, but I’m going to go ahead and say that it was a good one overall. For one thing, I successfully avoided calorie-bomb beverages for five out of seven days, and on those other two days it was just half a can of pop with supper. For every other beverage throughout the week I drank either water or herbal tea (with no milk or sugar). And for the record, that’s a huge sacrifice for me because I love pop and loathe plain water.
On the exercise front I can’t say that I did anything significant, but that’s because I’m much more out of shape than I thought I was. Every time I try to do anything I wind up feeling that my heart is going to burst from my chest, and the next morning my body feels like I got hit by a truck. So my plan for the next few weeks (and hubby, if you’re reading this, make me do it) is to hop on the treadmill for half an hour a day until I start to feel like I can handle something a little more intense.
Also, as a side note, I discovered that my FitBit can sync with the “My Fitness Pal” app, which is my favorite app for keeping track of calorie intake and exercise, so yay for that!
Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.
Week 9 was definitely not as good as week 8, but still not bad. I slacked off a little on Twitter, but I’ve been working hard on the “reciprocation” side of social media. That is, I’ve been actually hitting the “Like” button (or the “Favorite” button, or whatever) when I like something that someone else has posted or shared. I’ve also been sharing things that I really like to help promote them, and commenting on things instead of just moving on after I’ve enjoyed them. It only seems fair. If I want people to interact with me, I should interact with them, right? Right.
Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.
I feel like I’m forever repeating the same things over and over again, but as previously mentioned I haven’t been able to work on this for a while because I’ve been out West. That said, now that I’m home and unemployed for an indeterminate amount of time, I plan to put a real drive on for the final draft. If I can whip through the changes that I want to make based on my beta-reader’s comments, I should have a final draft in no time. Then I can focus on things like formatting and a cover, and get this sucker published!
Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.
The week when I fly home from out West always takes a hit on word count because of all the time I end up spending on packing, sitting on (extremely bumpy) buses, and just dealing with the hassles of traveling in general. That said, I’m actually not too disappointed in how I did this week. Handwriting blog entries in my notebook, I managed to put 3524 words to paper this week. I hope to at least double that number this coming week, so wish me luck!
Another Wednesday, another bout of accountability. It’s actually been a bit of an interesting week, so let’s just get right to it, shall we?
Goal #1: Lose at least ten pounds and become healthier overall.
This was always going to be the most difficult goal for me, simply because I love food and hate exercise. But while I can’t report a weight loss (I forgot to weigh myself before I came out West for this shift) I can report a couple of small victories.
One is that in the day and a half I’ve been out here for this shift I’ve already been more active and been eating better than I managed last shift. One big thing is that I’m avoiding the cans of pop like the plague, which is really difficult for me because I love pop and it’s free, dammit. But I digress… I’ve been drinking a lot of water and herbal tea. Also, I forced myself to have breakfast this morning. Also, also, I got up early to exercise. Unfortunately the exercise was cut off early because my trademark evil gut started playing with me, but tomorrow morning is another day.
The other small victory that I thought worth mentioning is that I’ve actually gotten several comments lately asking me if I’m losing weight. I don’t believe that I’ve actually lost any as far as the number on the scale, but it is possible that I’ve replaced some fat with muscle, so it’s nice to get the comments. Hopefully those who have brought it up are actually right and not just delusional.
Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.
It hasn’t been a particularly good week for this goal, mostly because I’ve been busy with other things and haven’t focused on it. Somedays I find it strangely difficult to think of a single thing to tweet, and I don’t like to overextend myself on Facebook because I already have my blog auto-post to there and I don’t want to annoy people. That said, I have been fairly active amongst the blogger community, and I resolve to do better in other areas this coming week.
Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.
Honestly, I didn’t expect to have anything to report for this one for quite a while. As I explained last week, I’d finally finished the first round of edits and was ready to ship my manuscript off to my beta reader, so I fully expected to have this goal out of my head for at least a few weeks. Amazingly, however, my beta reader turned out to be a super-woman who ate my manuscript up like a pint of double-fudge ice cream…all in one night! Yesterday morning I recieved the emails with her comments, complaints, and suggestions, and I was absolutely flabbergasted. Not only did she manage to read the entire novel in one night, but she also brought up some very excellent points that I never would have noticed myself. So now, much sooner than anticipated, I find myself preparing for the second round of edits. These ones (I freakin’ hope) will go much faster than the last ones because they’re mostly cosmetic changes and slight revisions. I won’t be able to start this round until I get home again, but in the meantime I’m going to definitely spend some time working out a game plan. Exciting!
Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.
This week wasn’t nearly as good as last week, but it was still excellent as far as how many words I should be getting in a week. I ended up with 9212 words, mostly through the virtue of planning a bunch of blog posts in advance. I’m both pleased and concerned with this result, because I can’t see me getting anywhere near that number again this week. It’s always so difficult to get much writing in while I’m out West…but that’s just my fatigue talking. Maybe this week I’ll finally break into that “642 Things to Write About” book that has been sitting in my luggage. Wish me luck!
Before I get started this morning I have a question to ask of any cat owners out there. Do any of you have any reason why my two cats (it may be just one of them, I don’t know because I’ve never caught them) randomly choose to go outside of their litter boxes? I’ve had these cats for something like 9 and 7 years respectively, so it’s not like they don’t know how this works. They have three litter boxes between the two of them so it’s not like there’s a sharing issue or something. And the thing is, I could understand if they went somewhere outside the box if I’d let the boxes get disgustingly dirty. But barely 24 hours ago I emptied and scrubbed all three litter boxes and filled them with brand spankin’ new kitty litter that was subsequently cleaned out later in the night, and this morning I wake up to find an enormous (no joke) pile of cat droppings in the middle of my living room floor. I’m at my wit’s end, people, and I’m THIS CLOSE to putting up spy cameras to catch the culprit so I can toss them out of the damn house. And don’t talk to me about animal cruelty, because if they keep this up and my three-year-old daughter happens to find the mess before I do, “cruel” is the least thing that I’ll be.
Okay, okay, a bit worked up this morning. Let’s take it down a notch with some accountability, shall we?
Goal #1: Lose at least ten pounds and become healthier overall.
I’m not even really sure what to report about this for this week. I haven’t been exercising, that’s for sure, though I have been doing a lot of housework and the like, so maybe that might count a little. I definitely haven’t been getting my 10,000 steps a day in, according to my Fitbit. I’ve been trying to force breakfast down my throat because “most important meal of the day” blah blah blah. Here’s another question on that topic: does anyone else find it genuinely sickening to eat when you first wake up? Because I do. It has nothing to do with what I’ve eaten the night before, because I’ve stopped eating at five in the evening and been unable to force myself to eat at seven the next morning. I just can’t eat when I first wake up. I’m not the slightest bit hungry and forcing food down my throat just makes me feel sick. On average I seem to have to be awake for a good two hours before my stomach is willing to accept food. And yet people tell me that you’re supposed to eat a hearty breakfast within the first hour of awakening. Tell me how that’s good for me if it makes me feel like throwing up?
I’m having a bit of a rant day today, it seems. *Ahem*
That said, I can tell you that I’m still about two pounds down from where originally started at the beginning of this goal, so at least I’m not gaining back. I fully plan on taking a pair of sneakers and exercise clothes out West with me on Monday, so here’s hoping for good things to happen in the future. All I have to do is figure out how to work exercise into a 12-hour work day without losing any more sleep than I already lose when I’m out there. 😛
Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.
As ever, this one is difficult to report. I don’t think I did terribly well this week, but not terribly bad either. I was only on Twitter a couple of times, but I did participate in the blogging community quite a bit this week. I also took to Facebook in order to make fun of the conditions in Sochi during the Olympics, but I guess that isn’t really any good for my author platform. Heh.
Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.
Now HERE is something to REPORT! 😀 I worked my ass off this week, and I am happy to report that editing is DONE! Or, at least, the first round of edits is done. I don’t want to rain on my own parade, but as I was editing I came up with a number of things that I expect my beta-reader to point out. I didn’t go back and fix them because many of them would have required a whole re-haul of everything I had already worked so hard to edit. My plan, thus, is to hand what I’ve got over to my beta-reader, see what she says about everything, and then base the second round of edits on that. Hopefully round 2 will be a lot quicker that round 1, if only because round 1 involved more re-writing than should normally be part of the editing process. Either way, until my beta-reader gets back to me I can officially wipe my hands of this particular manuscript and move on to other things, which FEELS SO GOOD YOU HAVE NO IDEA.
Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.
I had an excellent week this week, in part due to the massive editing push mentioned above, but also largely in part to planning blog posts in advance. Don’t get too excited…not all of them are typed up and scheduled…but I’m very proud of the job I’ve been doing. I’m hoping that by Monday when I head back out West, I’ll have the better part of those two weeks scheduled out. You see, part of my plan to work exercise into a 12-hour work day is working the blog writing out of the 12-hour work day. I’ll let you know if it works. In the meantime, I get to tell you that I wrote a grand total of 20,757 words this week. Not too shabby, right? Some quick calculations tell me that I’m about 14,000 words behind for the yearly total so far, but I’m not too concerned. It is very early in the year, and if I can manage to have a few more weeks like this I’ll be all caught up in no time.
Okay, let’s start up the day by apologizing for there being no blog posts the past two days with no explanation. Don’t worry, it wasn’t another family emergency or anything. Apparently I’d just forgotten how difficult it is to find time to bang these things out during the last few days of my shift when I’m trying to get my laundry done and pack and deal with a bunch of different buses to take me to the right places to eventually get on my plane and fly home in the middle of the night. So…yeah. Sorry about that. I’ll try to plan ahead next time. ._.
Goal #1: Lose at least ten pounds and become healthier overall.
Okay, confession time. Since returning out West and landing myself at a camp that has a huge fridge filled with cans of every flavor of pop out there, things have not been good. I like pop. I like it a lot. I also hate plain water, and mostly avoid the milk out West (because, sorry, it doesn’t taste right, I don’t know why) and the juice out West (because it’s fountain crap that is watered down and tastes awful). So, yeah…I’ve been drinking a lot of pop. Like…a lot of pop. Also, the dinners there are delicious, so I’ve been gorging at night, and alternatively the lunches are kinda pathetic, so I’ve been compensating with cookies and other treats.
Long story short, the eating habits have jackknifed into a bad place. I also didn’t really get any exercise for the two weeks out West because I forgot to take a pair of “indoor shoes” and therefore couldn’t use the gym, and also it turns out that my crew actually has trucks now that we can use to drive to the job instead of walking all over hell’s creation. That last bit is actually a good thing, overall, but it does dramatically cut back on the amount of exercise I get on a daily basis.
All in all, it’s been a poor couple of weeks. Remember last week when I said that I probably actually gained weight? Yeah, I was right. Luckily I had a buffer zone from the few pounds I lost that week I mysteriously couldn’t eat anything, so I’m not in the red or anything…but yeah. Pretty much starting from scratch.
Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.
This is always so difficult to report, but I think I did pretty good this week, considering the missed blog posts. I spent quite a bit of time on Twitter, and made spent more time than usual reading, liking, and commenting on blog posts. There’s not much to say other than that. But look! I’m participating! 😀
Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.
Okay, I just got home yesterday, so you can’t hold this one against me yet. Remember I said I was thinking about it? Really thinking about it? Well now I’m home, so I have two weeks to use those thoughts. I hope to start tonight, but I’m not making any promises, because my daughter has a fort in the living room and she keeps wanting me to come in with her and watch Teen Titans Go! through the doorway. I have to have priorities, man, geez.
Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.
And to top off a week of pretty poor accountability reporting, I have to say that I can’t tell you what my word count was for last week. The reason is not because I’m embarrassed about the skimpy word count (although, now that you mention it…); it’s because I’m having difficulty getting my word count spreadsheet to play nice between my tablet and my computer. I created it on my computer and had to move heaven and Earth to get it to both open and allow me to make changes on my tablet, and now apparently I’ve screwed up the file so that it will no longer open on my computer. So, when I get a chance, I guess I’m going to have to open it on my computer and physically re-input all the numbers into the version on my computer. Why not just use the tablet all the time? Just take my word on this…the program that I’ve had to use in order to get the spreadsheet to work on my tablet is outrageously frustrating to deal with. I may have to just track my words on paper while I’m out West from now on…that’s how terrible the tablet program is.
All that said, though I can’t give you the exact number right now, I can tell you that my word count for last week sucked tremendously. I fully plan on making up for that this week by pre-planning blog posts, finishing up the editing mentioned earlier, and hopefully banging out another chapter or two for Returning Hope, but again, I must bring your attention to the fort in my living room.
Most of you who happen to be reading this blog know that I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl. What only a few of you will know is what my day job is. I am an industrial instrumentation technician by trade, and many times since I began this career I have been asked how I happened to come into such an occupation. It’s a valid question. Even in this day and age the industrial and construction trades are a vastly male-dominated field, and even without going into the gender issue I simply do not appear to be the kind of woman who would do this kind of work. I’m small, I don’t appear to be very strong, and I enjoy activities that lean to the artistic side of the spectrum, and yet I do a job that requires a lot of grunt work, numbers and technological understanding, and often lands me in positions that are dirty, loud, and either extemely hot or extremely cold.
This was once my desk. Can you FEEL the dirt and stress?
So how did an artisticly-inclined girl with aspirations of becoming a novelist wind up in such a physical, technology-based, male-dominated profession? Well the first thing that you have to understand is that, while I’ve always loved the arts and greatly enjoyed such activities as writing, drawing, and singing, I was actually an extremely well-rounded child. To say that I was a nerd would not be stretching the truth in the slightest. I loved school for most of my younger years. I was always great at things like writing essays and book reports, but I was also very good at math and very interested in science. Often on this blog I will focus on the parts of my childhood that lead me to wanting to be a writer, but there were many other important aspects of my childhood that lead me on different paths. I’ve always loved understanding the way something works. When I was two years old my father caught me shoving a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into our VCR. In that moment he explained to me what the VCR was for and showed me how to use it, and I think that instilled in me a desire to know how everything worked. When something broke in our house I would take it apart and try to fix it. I rarely succeeded because the problem was usually electrical, but it was fun to try. And it didn’t have to be an appliance or gadget…if anything at all broke I would try to find a way to fix it. I remember once when one of my grandmother’s frames broke, I was determined to repair it for her. The piece that makes it stand up had snapped clean off, leaving two little holes where it had once been. I took a piece of scrap wire – a nice, stiff piece – and carefully bent it into a sturdy rectangle, the ends of which I poked through the holes in the frame. I was extremely proud to have “engineered” a solution. I felt an extreme sense of pride every time I managed to correct a problem.
Sometime in high school I decided that I was going to aim for the technologies, but I wasn’t sure which field to aim for. During my senior year, right around when we were supposed be starting to apply to colleges, one of my teachers told me about this program that was supposed to have an excellent reputation for graduates getting jobs right away. I never was 100% clear on the course or the jobs that would result from it, but it had something to do with GPS sytems. Since I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do exactly, and I had to start applying to colleges asap, I decided to go for it. As it was, that particular program was not in the cards for me. Oh, I applied, and I got in…that was no problem. But in early August of that year I got a letter from the school, letting me know that the program had been cancelled and that if I planned to attend that September I had to choose a new field of study immediately.
I can remember being panicked. I hadn’t been thinking about what I wanted to take because I had already been enrolled. I scoured the course schedules, looking for something technology-based that wasn’t too mechanical (I had absolutely no interest in cars) or design-centric (I also had no interest in sitting in a room drawing up plans for the rest of my life). What I landed on was something that I didn’t even really understand, but it sounded interesting and I was in a hurry. That program was a dual-graduate program. In three years I could graduate with a diploma in Electrical Engineering, and with one further year I could graduate with a Bachelor of Technology in Controls and Instrumentation. As it turned out I did both, though not with ease. There were some courses that nearly broke my spirit (having a professor with an extraordinarily thick Chinese accent and extremely poor anger management issues did not help), and there was one point during my third year when I nearly had a nervous breakdown, wondering what the hell I was doing and how on Earth I had come to find myself in these strange courses (programming languages were a huge surprise to me, and I don’t believe for a second that there is anyone on this planet who truly understands VHDL language).
But I got through, somehow or another, and I was lucky enough within six months of graduation to get a call from a paper mill located only an hour and a half from home. I moved to town for the job and promptly found out that four years of schooling had taught me positively jack. Don’t get me wrong, quite a bit of the stuff I learned in school was totally necessary, but let me make this perfectly clear: until you have actually worked in the trades, you know nothing.
The rest is history, I suppose. I spent five years at the paper mill, doing industrial maintenence. I was the first and only woman to ever be on the instrumentation crew at that mill, an honor that I’m fairly certain I still hold. I learned a lot, whether it was doing complex calculations and redesigning parts of the overall control program, or hanging underneath a grim-drenched pulp refiner with grease in my hair and dirty water dripping off my wrench and into my mouth while I fought with a jammed valve. And then, when the mill shut down, I took the (for me) ultimate leap and travelled out West to try my hand at commissioning work, which involves significantly less grease and grim, but significantly more unfortunate weather issues.
But when it comes right down to it, when people ask me how I wound up in this job, I always have to think about it for a moment or two before I answer, because honestly, half the time I don’t even know. What I do know is that winding up in this career, however unlikely it may seem when you look at me, has worked out for me. It’s not always glamorous work, but I enjoy it, and it allows me to take care of my family.
And until I become a rich, famous novelist, it’ll just have to do. 😉
I understand that I’m not the type of hotshot blogger who, when they go missing for a day or two, causes a mad panic amongst the internet crowd. Regardless, I’d like to apologize for my sudden disappearance over the past five days. I’m sure you’ll understand why I had a bit of an unscheduled hiatus when my father-in-law suddenly had a heart attack on Thursday (don’t worry, he’s alright now!), followed by a rush to get myself packed and ready to head back out West for the first shift of my new job. I spent the entire day today on a plane and have only just now arrived in the camp at which I’ll be residing for the next two weeks, so certainly you can see why I missed a few post days. But fear not! This camp has what (so far) appears to be rather excellent wi-fi internet, and my bluetooth keyboard is working just as nicely as it ever has, so I’m all set to continue blogging throughout the following shift.
I’m sure that you are all terribly relieved. 🙂
Stay tuned, because regular posts resume tomorrow!
Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s the new year again. We’ve crossed that barrier over into 2014 and are busy rubbing our eyes and staring ahead to all the possibilities that a new year holds. Personally, I find myself curled up on the couch under my new TARDIS blanket, plucking away this post while my husband and daughter are still asleep, hoping fervently that how I feel this morning is not a sign of what the year to come will be like. Begone, mysterious aches and pains! Go afflict someone who is actually old enough to feel this sore!
Anyway, this post isn’t about the fact that I seem to be suffering from an exceptionally painful cold (without any of the other symptoms). This post is about the fact that it is January 1st, a day rife with possibilities. What will the new year hold?
Well first of all, some of you may have guessed from this post that I wrote on Monday, that I’m going to be returning to the oil sands soon. Yes, after six straight months of glorious freedom unemployment, I’m set to begin work on the other side of the country again, starting the 21st of this month, with the same company and the same schedule that I had last time. This comes with mixed feelings, of course. It won’t be fun to leave my husband and daughter for half of every month again, and since I’ll be returning to the field instead of the control room I will find myself in a very difficult-to-get-any-writing-done position, but I do love the company, and it will be great to have some income again. What really worries me is that I’m going to be heading out to Northern Alberta in what is usually the coldest month, after having been snuggled all warm and cozy in the control room for the last half of last winter. My body may go through a bit of a shock. Luckily we always work in teams of two out there, so there will be someone to drag my frozen solid ass back to the trailers every day. Wish me luck, people. Wish me luck.
“Don’t worry, ma. You go out West. I’ll handle this!”
Secondly, since it’s a near year it’s time for new goals. At the beginning of 2013 I wrote out three “Wildly Improbable Goals”. Technically, I failed on all three of them, but having them down as goals definitely helped me get some things done, make some changes in my life and my way of thinking, and overall I had a rather productive year, as compared to previous years.
This year I’ve decided that I’m going to be a little less “Wildly Improbable” and a bit more, “you damn-well know that you can do this, so DO IT” with my goals. I want my goals to be things that I know I can complete, if I’d just get off my ass and work on them. So let’s start, shall we?
Goal #1: Lose at least ten pounds and become healthier overall.
I know, I know…don’t look at me like that. This is not one of those, “oh, it’s the new year so I’m going to buy a bunch of exercise equipment that I’ll only use for two weeks before it becomes a coat rack” kind of goals.
You see, I’ve been getting older, and the genes that my parents passed down to me don’t like that. I’ll be turning 30 in 2014, and while that is still pretty damn young to most people, to my physical being it’s like hitting the countdown to complete bodily failure. Things are starting to catch up with me, and I don’t like them.
For one thing, I seem to have inherited a wonderful trait from my father, wherein every second thing that I eat makes me feel like little needle-clawed demons are trying to rip their way out of my digestive tract. My father dealt with this for years before a doctor basically told him to eat a lot more fiber, and oh, throw some yogurt in there too. It sounds like a throwaway answer, but my dad has been doing great, so part of my health goal for this year is to make sure that there is always lots of fiber in my diet. Hopefully the result will be a calmer, less-demon-infested stomach.
The “at least 10 pounds” part of the goal is in there because, to be honest, I’m falling apart at the seams and I blame a good part of that on the extra 20-40 lbs that is hanging on to my body. I’m perfectly fine with the way I look right now, but I’m not fine with the way I feel. Even before the mysterious New Year’s aches-and-pains from hell, I’ve been feeling pretty crappy most of the time. I’m always sore in one spot or another, I’m extremely lethargic most of the time, and I’m so cranky and slow on a regular basis that it makes it very difficult to play with my daughter. I really believe that most of this could be fixed by losing a bit of weight (and, obviously, being more active in general), so I’m making it a goal. I’m not worried about getting down to what I perceive as the “proper” weight…I’m just going to worry about the first 10 pounds and then move on from there. Are we all cool with that? Okay, good.
Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.
2013 saw a lot of ups and downs for me as far as the whole social media = great author platform thing. I always managed to keep pressing forward with my blog, but other forms of social media often fell by the wayside. Twitter is one of the greatest things out there for connecting with other writers, agents, publishers, readers, and so on, and it only takes a few seconds to type up a Tweet, and yet I regularly go for weeks without Tweeting a single thing aside from the auto-Tweets that WordPress shoots out when I write a blog post.
This year I want to be more active and more diligent with my author platform. I want to show people that, yes, I’m really here, and hey, how are you doing today? More and more this is becoming an extremely important part of being a successful writer, and I don’t want to be left behind in the dust.
Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.
This one feels more “wildly improbable” than the others, but it’s not…it’s NOT, dammit!
I spent the last year trying to finish editing on my manuscript, and that task is almost complete. I already have a beta-reader lined up to swap manuscripts with. This year is going to be the year of really, truly, finishing a novel. I know that my manuscript has problems even before my beta-reader touches it, but I plan to sit back and wait to hear what she has to say, and then work my ass off once she hands it back. If at all possible I want to publish by the end of this year. I want my zombie novel to be out there before zombies stop being something that people want to read about (which is why I definitely will not be going with traditional publishing…man, you guys are SLOW). This is a big thing for me. By the end of 2014 I want to be a published author.
And to all my religious friends, your prays are totally welcome on this one. 😛
Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.
Last year I made the Wildly Improbable Goal to write one million words over the course of a year. Though that goal turned out to be completely out of my league (it didn’t occur to me until halfway through the first month that this would be over 83,000 words a month), I did end up writing significantly more words in 2013 than in any year previous…possibly in all the years previous.
I came with in striking distance of 500,000 words last year, so this year I want to exceed that goal and beat my own personal record. Half a mil over the course of a year is just over 41,000 words a month. Judging from last year it will be difficult, but I have faith that I’ll be able to pull it off.
And there you have it. Four goals for the New Year, all of them significantly more probable than not. I’m going to continue on with my accountability posts (though they’ll be moving to Wednesdays now) because personally I find nothing helps with a goal so much as admitting to the general public that you haven’t been working on it. 😛
How about it, friends and fellow bloggers? What are your goals for the New Year?
This is it. Not only is this my last accountability post of the year, but at midnight tonight 2013 will be complete.
Image borrowed from seaandbescene.com
It’s been a busy and interesting year. I spent the first six months of the year working out West in the Alberta oil sands on a 2 weeks out, 2 weeks home schedule that involved a heck-of-a-lot of flights back and forth across the country and quite a bit of time away from my daughter and husband. The other six months I spent contentedly unemployed, enjoying just being home but also very busy with a growing toddler, your usual insane amount of housework, and trying to fit lots of writing and a reasonable amount of leisure time in there was well.
This year I turned 29. Thanks to my work out West I paid off both my and my husband’s student loans, and completed the payments on our car, leaving us with no other debt besides our mortgage. I also struggled – both during work and during unemployment – to work as hard as I could on my writing, both the fiction and the blogging varieties. This year I participated in my sixth NaNoWriMo and netted my fifth win. I also (nearly) completed editing on my first ever finished manuscript, and I wrote a significant amount toward a fantasy adventure that I’ve been working on for several years now.
I wrote 248 blog posts this year. Two hundred and forty-eight.
My daughter turned three years old this year. I made her a kick-ass MegaMan costume for Halloween, which she loved, and I built (from scratch) a tickle trunk for her for her birthday. Speaking of which, I baked and decorated about a million My Little Pony cupcakes for that birthday as well.
We had an awesome holiday, I was given some truly awesome presents by my husband and my whole family, my daughter proved that she could quickly figure out the use of a kid-tablet that’s marketed more toward older kids, and here we find ourselves at the end of 2013, just waiting for the clock to tick over.
And so here is my last bout of accountability for the year, with comparisons to the “Wildly Improbable Goals” that spawned them in the first place.
Health and Body Image Goal
1. Get into some kind of shape that makes me feel good about my body again…I’m not looking at a particular amount of weight-loss or anything specific, just a state of physical being that I feel good about. I slate this as a wildly improbable goal because, as I’ve mentioned before, my work schedule makes devoting time to such a thing particularly difficult.
A year has passed since I wrote the above, and not a lot has changed outwardly. If I were to go hunt down a photo of myself from last January and compare it to a photo now you probably wouldn’t see much of a difference. I had periods throughout 2013 where I did an excellent amount of exercise, and periods when I was more slovenly than I’ve ever been in my life. I had periods during which I ate pretty well, and periods during which I deserved every second of the stomach pains that I incurred. I managed to work myself toward running a 10 min/mile, and then completely lost that ability.
But here’s the thing: though I didn’t lose any (significant) weight or inches, wasn’t able to go down a pant size or stick to a healthy eating routine, I did accomplish something. I came to a realization that while I do want to lose some weight and become healthier overall, I am perfectly satisfied with my body the way it is right now. I don’t feel fat, I don’t feel ugly. I feel like a mom and a wife and a tradeswoman, and that’s okay with me, even if I go a whole year more without losing a single pound.
Editing Goal
2. Finish editing my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide. It’s time to get this f’er on the shelves, damn it!
A good chunk of 2013 saw this goal effectively ignored, due to my complete inability to find a decent word processor to work from my tablet while I was out West. But when I did finally get to work on this goal, I really went crazy. Everything came to a screaming halt once the holidays hit, but to date I only have approximately two and a half chapters (which, I think, are the best-written chapters anyway) to finish editing. So while I didn’t technically complete this goal, I feel very good about where I managed to find myself and am confident that I’ll be able to do something great with my manuscript in the new year.
1,000,000 Word Goal
3. Write 1,000,000 words in 2013. This is the big one. Where am I going to find the time? I have no idea. But between blog posts, drabbles, new stories, and new scenes added to NtH during editing, I want to accomplish a total word count of ONE MILLION words by the end of 2013. Wouldn’t that be something? I think it would.
It became evident within the first few months of the year that this wasn’t likely to happen. There just weren’t enough hours in the day while I was out West in order to write the 83,333 words per month necessary to complete this goal. I eventually came to the conclusion that 500,000 words was a more reasonable goal, though I continued to refer to it as the 1,000,000 word goal, because wouldn’t that be awesome? Unfortunately, as with my editing goal, the holidays hit at just the right time to keep me from progressing quite far enough. As of the completion of this post, my grand total word count for the year of 2013 came to 457,067 words. I didn’t come anywhere near my original million word hope, and I came several thousand words short of my revised half-a-million word hope, but I have to be honest: I’m quite amazed with what I did manage to do. I’ve been writing for more than 15 years, and I don’t know if I wrote so many words over the course of the first 14 all together, never mind that many over the course of one year. I’m incredibly proud of myself and have every intention of blowing away that personal record in 2014. Here’s to acting like a real writer. 🙂
So there it is. One year ends, another one begins. I hope everyone has a great New Years Eve, and that everyone greets 2014 with heads held high.
As I mentioned on Tuesday, this week I have a mini-goal to wrack up enough of a word count to bring my yearly total thus far to 200,000. As such I’ve been doing everything I can to get words down. I’ve been blogging (obviously), doing morning pages via 750Words.com, and repairing scenes in my supernatural romance. What I haven’t been doing is writing anything new.
Here’s my problem: since I’ve been home from out West, I’ve only been writing on my laptop. I type a helluva lot faster than I write by hand, so it only makes sense to use that speed. But for months now I’ve been writing in notebooks; thousands of words of long-hand.
So. Many. Words.
Why is that a problem? Well, I have tons of my works-in-progress in notebooks…none of it on my laptop. For instance, I have the first four chapters of my epic fantasy novel on my laptop, then about a dozen chapters in notebooks. So if I want to continue on with that work-in-progress, I either have to skip a bunch of chapters in my Scrivener file in order to move on, or take the time to transcribe all the notebooks onto my laptop
Maybe I’m alone in this, but it would drive me absolutely insane to move on with the story without most of what I’ve written actually being in the Scrivener file. It’s just one of those things. I’d absolutely lose my mind. But on the other side of things, it will take me ages to transcribe everything that I’ve written in notebooks, and that will be time that I could have spent writing something else and wracking up word count. I suppose I could count word
s transcribed as words written, but that feels like cheating, since they’re technically words I’ve already written.
So I leave it to you, fellow bloggers and readers: should I take the time to transcribe, or move on to something else? If I take the time
transcribe, should I count the words toward my word count or not? Your thoughts are greatly appreciated!
I’ve been talking a lot lately about Kristen Lamb‘s Rise of the Machines. And I’m not likely to stop anytime soon because every time I get a minute to read a bit more I end up finding something I want to talk about. It’s just that good. 😀
Today I read a short chapter that invites us to establish which type of writer we are…Spring, Summer, Fall, or Winter. Spring writers are the young ones with tons of time, almost no responsibilities, but not a lot of experience. Fall writers are older so they have lots of experience, and they have few responsibilities because their bills are probably paid off and their children are probably grown up. Winter writers are of advanced age, meaning they don’t have a lot of time left to make their writing dreams come true, but the time they do have can be 100% devoted to writing, and they have tons of experience.
I fall firmly into the category of Summer writer. In fact, I fall so firmly in this category that I found myself nodding enthusiastically as I was reading Kristen’s description. Summer writers are still fairly young, but they’re old enough to have gained a bit of worldly experience. At first it seems like an ideal time to be writing, but there are other problems. The biggest problem facing Summer writers is that they are in the most responsibility-laden era of their lives. Summer writers have day-jobs, children, mortgages, car payments, student loan payments, chores and errands that need doing. Summer writers can’t always find time to write because they have to dedicate many of their waking hours dealing with day-to-day career and family issues. Summer writers may be fatigued because they’re run off their asses by household requirements and children keeping them up at all hours of the night.
Summer writers, to put it succinctly, are bogged down with copious amounts of stress. They’re young, and they have experience, but they have no time.
Currently I am experiencing a slight reprieve, as my job out West recently finished and we’ve paid off enough debts that we don’t have to worry about money for a little while. Regardless, a lack of time is still my biggest complaint. On a daily basis, as the sun wanes in the West, I chastise myself for not writing more, and promise to do better the next day. But the next day I find a million other things to do, or the baby has a bad day, or I didn’t get any sleep that night so I’m completely knackered. And so when I do get a few moments when I could be writing, I instead find myself reading or playing video games or watching movies in bed (and trying not to drift off while doing so).
I’m not trying to give myself a pass or anything; I don’t get to just blame all my troubles on the fact that I’m at a particular period of life and I don’t get to whine that I can’t write because everything else is in the way. But I can say that there are challenges, and that I’m definitely not alone in having to deal with them.
No matter the season, all writers have struggles that they must work through, and as a Summer writer, I invite all other “Summers” to struggle with me. We have families and jobs and responsibilities, but we also have writing, and we have each other. We can do it, come hell or high water!
What season are you? What struggles do you fight with because of the time of life you happen to be in? Please share! I’d love to hear from you!
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