Everyday Accountability
It’s the second full week of school for my Kiddos so it’s also the second full week of being able to say that I’m a full time writer. But oh boy! Look at all of those excuses to procrastinate!
And that has been the struggle the last week and a half.
While in my mind’s eye I envisioned myself sitting down to work on editing my rough draft as soon as the kid’s were off to school that first day – the reality was ugly. I panicked with so much free time and ended up not being very productive when it came to writing. But, and there’s always a but, I did decide that it was the perfect time to paint the office in the new house. That’s a pretty good excuse not to really work on the book, right? Right? *crickets*
It’s okay though, it was only a three day school week, no big loss. Monday will be here soon enough.
And then Monday hit. My first full week without anyone at the house with me! So much writing will get done! Just look at that rough draft sitting there waiting for the first round of editing. But oh, I forgot…..I need to have a website! Right? And I need to learn to do it all by myself and if I have a website and blog I need to have a twitter account. And a tumblr account. And an instagram account and make a pinterest board and so on and so forth. What was supposed to be the first full week of writing bliss slowly slipped by with little actual writing or editing to show for it.
So I had a sit-down with myself this past weekend to figure out just how I intend to fix this. The answer was easy: Just sit down and edit the damn book!
It’s the implementing that plan that’s the hard part. It’s been so long since I sat down every day to write that it’s overwhelming now that I can get back to it. It’s also scary because the prospect of failure seems greater now.
Monday this week was a rough writing day. I looked at the edits I’ve done so far on my rough draft and I found that I wasn’t liking the direction I had been taking my story in. I liked the story before I started trying to “improve” it. I won’t lie – there were some tears. I’ve been working on the edits for a long time thanks to the move and everything that goes with relocating and settling down.
Thankfully I had another excuse to end the bad day early: The girl child had a doctor’s appointment and afterwards we had some errands to run. I spent the evening collecting my thoughts and decided to do the hard thing: Go back to square one and start over on edits. That’s not to say I can’t use any of the stuff that I’ve rewritten, I just need to stay on point and not let little details get me bogged down again. It is only the first of probably several edits after all.
I went to bed early last night – once I made my decision – to prepare for a new start this morning.
But now is the time to be all in and so I’ll be doing weekly accountability reports every Friday. Today, of course, is not Friday but I wanted to get a jump on it today. I’ll also be posting one on Friday also.
Enthrall is the working name for my book. As it stands right now the total draft is 67,877 words. I’m a putter-inner rather than a taker-outer (Those are totally legit terms guys, I promise.)
For today:
8.30.2016: Chapter One Edit – 2174 (1867)*
*Numbers in Bold denote final word count post edit. Numbers in Italics denote word count before edit took place.
As you can see I added some words. That doesn’t mean I didn’t take out any because I did. I just happened to put more in than I took out and hopefully the words I put in were better than the ones I took out.