Motivation, Thou Art Fickle

Well, it happened.  The thing I knew was going to happen.  How did I know?  Because it always does.  I always fall prey to the mindset of not wanting to do anything for a single day.  And that single day somehow always follows the day when I was too busy to finish all of my work.  And where does that leave me?

Behind.  That's where it leaves me.  I'm supposed to be finishing up chapter 10 today during my editing challenge, and instead I'm stuck on chapter 6 (which requires rewrites) and I shouldn't be.  Because yesterday I had the entire day to work, and instead I chose to watch TV shows.

Now, you might think, how is it that I could just decide to watch TV shows and not feel guilty over not doing the work I promised myself to do?  The answer to that probably isn't what you think.  I do feel guilty.  Unfortunately guilt doesn't seem to keep my motivation in overdrive.  It just makes me wallow.  And when I wallow, I don't get any work done, I just keep putting it off more and more until suddenly I find myself piled under a mountain of work that I would have been able to get through if I hadn't been so damn lazy.

Don't get my wrong, I'm not complaining.  I did this to myself, just like I always do.  And I'm going to try and make sure that I get the work done today.  (This means editing 5 chapters -- at least -- writing one epiphany, and this blog post.)  At least I've gotten started before it's dark outside.

Unfortunately, now is when my brain has actually started to feed me information about the novel I'm currently planning.  (I don't know a whole lot about it yet, but I can tell you that it's set two hundred years in the future where only the very rich own cars, and most people travel around via teleportation pads.  The main character is a spy who has been forgotten and has taken to drink and sleeping around to forget .)  The problem with that is that I need to have Stolen Magick edited to a second draft by the end of January.  The other novel isn't going to even be written until June at the earliest, so why am I focusing on something that doesn't need to be done for a couple more months?

Okay, maybe I've slipped in to complaining a little bit.  Sorry.

Anyway, I'm once more recommitting myself to my goals.  I need to get this book editing.  I've promised myself that I'm going to plan, write and edit four complete novels this year, and damn it, I'm going to do it!  I just have to make sure that the motivationless days don't come around very often.  I have things to do, and if that means that I can't always keep up on all of the shows that I love, well so be it.

This is what I want to do with my life, and I'm not going to let a little bit of laziness get in my way.  So it's back to the YA for me.  I've got some words to wrestle into shape.

Do you ever find yourself unable to stay motivated?  How do you force yourself to keep working?

August Is So Not My Month

When I signed up for Camp Nano this August, I knew that it wasn't going to be easy to get through it.  I had a busy month planned from the get go with a wedding to attend, a writers conference calling my name, a couple of birthdays demanding my attention, and all the random other little things that make up my existence.  It was going to be a busy month, but I was sure that I could power through it.

So, here it is, the fifth day of the month, and I'm TOTALLY powering through it.

Except that totally is a bit of an exaggeration.  And powering through should be more like floundering and wondering what the hell I signed myself up for this time.

Last year I did both sessions of Camp Nano.  I managed to finish July's, but August only managed to pull 17k words out of me before I was done for the month.  It's a sad story for me, the girl who can usually write upwards of 200k in a month, but it's what happened.

This year I thought I would be ready for it.  I had a plan for both months (last year I wrote a single novel between the two months, and never ended up finishing it because it was that bad.  They walked for the entire thing, and there wasn't nearly enough description for me to claim I was pulling a Tolkien, so it was abandoned.) and I was going to finish both of them, damnit!

Well, I got through June with 120k.  In fact, I finished the novel I was working on and actually started a second novel because I had time left over.  It wasn't anything that I planned, so it hasn't really gone anywhere, but I started it!  I didn't even write for the last week because I was having some serious computer problems.

After that, I thought that August would be a piece of cake.  Simple, easy.  I could blow right through it without even stopping to get gas or pick up another bottle of pop to get me through those last few kilometers.

Apparently I was wrong.  At the risk of someone hunting me down and killing me for saying this, I'm sitting at only 17,464 words written for the month.  (No, don't grab your weapons.  Remember, my goal is 5k a day, not 1667 that most nanoers go for.  I'm the crazy girl that doesn't understand the concept of writing less than 150k in a month....)  Which puts me firmly 8k below my current goal.  Adding in tomorrow's 5k that brings me up to 13k that I need to somehow make up.


Why am I not writing right now?  Now that's a funny story.  My inner editor -- the one that I have actually constructed a cage for that you wouldn't believe -- is screaming at me.  She escaped, you see, and she's determined to ruin my enjoyment of Camp Nano.


I've written nearly 6k today, all of which I am absolutely certain is crap, not to mention the rest of the 11k that was already done that I'm pretty sure should just be tossed in the garbage and forgotten ever existed.


With that frame of mind, I gave up on the idea of pounding out the last 4k that would have made catching up a little easier (especially with the writing conference next weekend...I'm never finishing this novel, am I?) I figure it's safer to take a step back today, spend tomorrow hunting down the damned inner editor once more and making sure the padlock is secured, then getting back to writing when I get back from the museum.


I hope everyone else's Camp Nano journey is going as well as they had hoped.  I can't wait to see the final counts at the end of the month.  I hope we beat June for how many people cross that finish line!


For now, I'm off to do some editor hunting.  If you hear screams, don't worry, I have it under control.

So Behind!

On Wednesday I told you all about my critique group, which (in case I didn't tell you then) I actually love.  A lot.  And I'm seriously excited about this Monday when we get to see what everyone came up with for some writing prompts that were sent out.

Now, I actually finished my stories for Monday on Friday.  And I was happy that I managed it, because I was having some difficulties with the second short story I was writing.  You see, I started writing it on Thursday, and by Friday I was a fair bit into it.  It was sitting at 1500 words, and I had it open and was staring at it during #FNTWP, when I realized why I wasn't willing to write as much as I normally am.

Nothing was happening in it.  I mean, at all.  The story was starting to read like the first chapter of a novel, with world building to boot.

Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed the world.  In fact, I may find myself writing about that world in the near future.  Unfortunately, the way it was reading wasn't good for a short story.  I had to somehow put a whole lot of tension and conflict into the last 1500 words, and I didn't even know where the story was going.  I didn't have a good enough grasp on the character, or the setting, to be effective doing it.

Of course, this realization came only after a comment was made by a twitter friend (L.S. Taylor) asked me if maybe there wasn't any tension in it.  That was when I went back and reread what I had written so far (something I don't usually do for fear that I'll not want to finish writing it because it's just that bad).  And it was that bad.  I had a moment of sitting there staring dumbly at the screen, thinking 'what the hell am I going to do now', and then another story idea hit me.

There wasn't even a moment's hesitation after I had that random idea.  I instantly closed that document, opened another and was off.  I finished the story some three hours later (though it is sitting at 3650 words, and needs to be cut down closer to 3000).

Now, of course, I have 2 full short stories (totaling about 6850 words) and 2 chapters (totaling about 5000 words) to edit before tomorrow.  I'm sitting at work, wondering if I will possibly have time to do it all, and kicking myself for not getting it done sooner.  I probably shouldn't be so hard on myself, after all, if I had finished that second story any sooner, it wouldn't be what it is right now.  I would still be holding onto that first story that was going nowhere, and I would have heard about it from my critique group come Monday.

Unfortunately I'm stuck trying to get it all done today so that I'm ready for tomorrow. (Technically I have until the end of the day to get in my submission for next week, but as tomorrow is going to be a full day, I just don't have time to work on it.  Which means I must have it done tonight!!)

Well, I suppose I should really get on it so I can get caught up.  Wish me luck!!

One Step Forward, But Standing Still

Today I finished the editing for my next critique group submission.  I wanted to get it done yesterday, but it seems I have become better at procrastination than I originally thought.  So, I decided to be happy with finishing today, as well as getting this blog post done.

Anyway, the point of the matter is that I finished the next two chapters, and I was happy that I finished it so early in the week, even if it was a day later than I was actually hoping for.  I was ahead of the game.

Unfortunately then I made the mistake of looking at my Dangerous Waters manuscript.  That's the one I'm trying to get through right now.  That's the one I want to have polished and ready by the end of April.  That's the one I want to query and get published.  It's the one I've put the most work into.

Sadly, it's also the one that still needs the most work.

A couple of weeks ago I went through the chapters I had left to edit and picked through the ones that (obviously) needed rewrites, and the ones I could try and edit.  I also figured out how many chapters I would have to add in order to fix the many mistakes I made while writing the novel.  (While it wasn't one of my nano novels, I still wrote it fairly quickly, and as it was one of my early novels, I didn't have the plot nailed down nearly as much as I thought when I started writing it).

Thirteen.  That's the number of chapters that need to be rewritten or added altogether.  I only had about twenty left to edit, so that's a fair amount.

This leaves me with a bit of a problem.  All of that work certainly doesn't make me want to actually do the editing.  It probably would have been better if I hadn't gone through and figured out what needed to be done.  Yet I can't regret it because I've always been a planner.  I actually spend more time planning them than I do writing them.  So not knowing how much I was going to have to change was bothering me enough that I felt I had to do it, and I did.

Being at a stand still with Dangerous Waters, however, means more than that one novel never being finished.  In fact, not finishing that novel means that all the other projects I have on the go (refer to the Progress Report section) are also not getting worked on or completed.

Sometimes I tend to get myself in over my head.  For example, during nano I decided to write 200,000 words.  But about five days in I changed that to 300,000 words.  Most of the month I was overwhelmed and thought I wouldn't finish.  I did.  Just barely, but I did.  Now I have all of this work, and I'm feeling overwhelmed, but for some reason I'm not really moving forward.  I can get done what I need to get done for my critique group, but other than that, I'm not making any progress.

It doesn't matter that I really want to finish this novel.  That I want to have it, done and complete, in my hands, and ready to send out to agents and publishers.  I want to feel like I've accomplished something.

I guess I'll just have to suck it up and get down to it.  Starting tomorrow (and everyday for at least a little while until Monday) I'm going to continue editing Dangerous Waters.  I have a goal to finish the next three chapters by the end of Sunday.  (In case you were wondering, the next three chapters are ALL rewrites, so it's going to be harder than it sounds.)

Don't worry, I'll let you know how it goes in my next post, also scheduled Sunday.  Till then, happy editing!

Getting Overwhelmed

It's the twelve hour write in today, which means that I have absolutely no time to think of and plan out a blog post. So I'm going to just wing it like a usually do. Here goes:

When November first started, if I fell a little behind, I remember thinking it would be fine because there was still so much month left. I didn't have to worry about a few thousand words, I could make them up that weekend, or on my next day off. It would be fine.

Now, though, it's so close to the end of the month, and thinking about how much writing I still have to do in order to get to the goal I set for myself, I'm starting to feel overwhelmed. It doesn't seem to matter to my brain that I have already written two entire books in ten days each. It keeps trying to tell me that this is just not going to work. That there simply is not enough time left to get everything done.

So today I am telling my brain 'Shut up Brain!' and getting on with my day. Mostly because it's twelve hour, and do I really have time to have that argument with my brain? No. No I don't. But also because I have to write 15k today, and if my brain keeps telling me that I can't do it, I won't do it.

Here are the facts. I have had 5 15k days so far this month. So what's one or two more? I have 2 completed novels printed out and waiting for me to start editing them. (One will be used during critique group. The other is set aside for NaNoEdMo in March). I am almost half way through a third novel which is the sequel to the novel I started editing before nano and will continue to edit afterward, hopefully fast enough to get it into ABNA.

One more fun little fact for you: I AM going to hit my 300k goal. I AM going to allow myself to buy the nano messenger bag I've been eyeing since they put it up. I AM going to start looking for an agent next year because writing IS what I am going to do with my life.

I am not going to let my brain dictate to me anymore. I am good enough to be an author. I have written almost 6 novels now, and I will not let that go to waste. They will not all end up in the dusty folder in the back of my computer never to be seen from again. I refuse!

The End.

A Whole New World

Yesterday I had to find a way to dive into a new world. I finished my second novel on Sunday, and those characters were still talking to me. Pointing out that, once again, my epilogue didn't follow the path I had laid out for it. Telling me what they thought should happen at the beginning of the next book and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

This is what typically happens when I finish a novel. My characters give me absolute gold...but only once I'm done. And I tend to spend at least a couple of hours writing things down and already seeing the next novel coming to life in my head. (For anyone who doesn't know me, I should probably explain. I can't quite figure out how to write a stand alone book. I've tried, but my plots are always so much bigger than that...)

Unfortunately, because my plans for this month were so high, I no longer have time to just sit and write down all of these things my characters are telling me. In fact, when I finish one novel, I need to move onto the next without giving myself much time at all to wrap up the last one.

What ends up happening is that I stare at the blank first page of the new novel for ever, while the other characters continue talking to me, and try to get the new characters to open up and start talking. It's a frustrating process, as I tend to write a lot less than I should, and a lot slower, because the new characters aren't yet asserting themselves and becoming a priority.

I know that I'll probably be back into it by tonight. Though I still have a few pictures from the last book running through my head, I'm also starting to think of the new book and the events that are coming up (some of them I'm really excited for, as this book is actually a sequel, and I've been wanting some of these events to happen for quite a while now.) In the meantime, though, I find myself falling a little further behind everyday, and getting headaches from the clashing characters and worlds.

The worst part is I have yet to adapt to the voice of this novel, and I keep throwing in things from the last. Thankfully I'll be able to catch those things when I eventually get to the editing phase (I'll probably put it off as long as possible...) Still, I would really like to get back into this world that I once knew so well.

With any luck tonight I'll be able to pull myself back in and not get too much farther behind. But, even if I can't catch up with my goal, that's alright, because I already have far more words than I had before the month started, and really, that's what nano is all about.

Is It Hot In Here? Cause My Motivation Evaporated...

So, remember how I said that my motivation is competition? Don't worry, I didn't lie to you. If there is competition, I'm willing to up my word count. I'm willing to spend hours at my desk, causing back aches and wrist weakness, just so that I keep that number one spot and don't let anyone pass me. And if someone starts to get close, you can bet that my next day off is going to be spent trying to get as many words as I can so that I'm not worried about them passing me while I'm at work.

Unfortunately, there's a rather nasty side effect. When people start dropping further and further behind me, and I no long have someone telling me that they're going to beat me no matter what it takes, all of that motivation suddenly evaporates. Like it wasn't even there. Suddenly I”m negotiating with myself. Telling myself that I increased my original goal, so if I don't hit my new goal it'll be fine. I don't really need to catch up. I can come in 10k behind. It will all be alright!

And yet, no matter how many of those conversations I have with myself (I swear I don't answer myself back...okay...maybe I do...) I can't quite convince myself that I wont fee disappointed at the end of the month when I'm not sitting at 300k. Because I know I will. I know that I'll think I could have done better. Especially since nothing really has come up. No emergencies that have dragged me kicking and screaming (or just a little too willing) from my keyboard. Not even an unexpected day at work. Instead, I'm just not quite as willing to stay up late to get the word count. Or to give up my shows so I have more time to write.

I need the motivation back. I need people to come on the chat and outright challenge me to a word duel (I'll even take a handicap, I swear.) I need to get that excitement and drive back so that I can finish this nano with a bang, rather than limp across the midnight finish line unable to hold my word count up as what I wanted to do.

Or maybe I just need to stop watching the shows that distract me from my characters, and bury myself in their world. Put myself in their shoes and let that drive me for a while. It works for other writers, why not me? I can change my motivation!

In the mean time, though, I think I'll continue to hang around the chat until someone comes along to word war with. Then I'll start writing.

Time to Play a Little Catch Up

So today I got to play a little catch up. Before any of you say anything, yes I am aware that I hit the 50k last week, but I can promise you that I still have a long way to go to hit my goal. And, I realize that I put myself in this position, but I'm just saying, the higher your goal, the easier it is to fall behind. And the harder it is to catch up.

Today I ended up writing 15k (something I hadn't wanted to do, since when I did that the first day, my wrists were killing afterward) and, yes I did get caught up. But I also had to spend the entire writing. As much as I love writing, I also happen to enjoy my days off, so I had been hoping to be caught up before today.

So, now I'm caught up to my goal, and tomorrow I get to go back to work.

Now, I'm not saying that I don't like my job. I do. It's probably one of the best jobs I've ever held. It has it's downfalls, for one it's customer service, and we all know that not all customers are actually all that smart. But for the most part, I enjoy going to work. I love the people I work with, and it's definitely a step up from my last job.

The problem is, now that I've caught up, I'm looking at tomorrow and wondering, am I going to get everything done tomorrow? Or is it going to be another day where I end up just a few words shy of my goal. A few words that I can't quite make up the next day and end up getting further away from my goal. And on my next day off is it going to be another day of trying to get my word count back up to were it's supposed to be?

And then all those other things I want to do, like maybe keep up with at least a couple of shows during November, or finishing the plot for my third novel, which I may in fact need before the month is up, or maybe, just maybe, getting to sit down and read a book that someone else wrote. Am I going to be able to do any of that? Because if I fall behind again, it's doubtful.

So right about now, even after the successful day I had, all I can think about is whether or not I really should have decided to up my goal to 10k a day (effectively 300k) rather than the 200 I had originally settle on. Is this going to be worth it in the end, or am I just going to have crap sitting in front of me and two wrists that refuse to stop hurting?

This is, I suppose, my version of the second week slump. Many people start to taper off right around now. The high of starting the month begins to wear off, and life begins to intrude, and they start to wonder what exactly did they sign up for.

What did I sign up for? And why was I so crazy as to think I could do it?

With a renewed hope to hit my goal, and two tired wrists, I've decided that I'm going to do it if it kills me. Because when I'm done writing this month, and I get my novels printed out, I know that I'm going to look at them and think that this was something I will never regret. Three finished novels. In one month. Not many people can claim that. That makes it worth it. Right?