For various reasons, our books are not done. The task of writing a 60,000-100,000 book is akin to climbing Everest, tomorrow, without any training.
But, let’s break this mountain down.
Writing is about rhythm. Get up every day or writing at lunch or before you go to bed.
If you wrote 400 words a day. (this blog post is 149 words)
You’ll need about 30 minutes. (one less episode of__)
If you do this every single day. (this is your dream remember? show a little tenacity!)
You’ll be done in 250ish days. (100,000 words in less than a year!)
This draft will certainly need some TLC (You have 115 days to plot/edit!)
But it will be done. (And you’ll feel like you can do anything)
Food for thought.
No more excuses.
This is your dream.
Writing is hard work, not dancing in a field of lilies.
Don’t give up.
Write 500 words today.
Cheers,
Bob
PART-TIME NOVEL 
I’m having a hard time finding a rhythm. I’m partly to blame. With things as they are here, I have very little time and that time doesn’t always arrive at the same… er, time. And by the time I have time, I’m too tired. I know this sounds a lot like I’m whining. I’m not, just saying in a roundabout way that you are right and this is good advice and I need to adapt. Because that novel won’t write itself, no matter the excuses. Thanks again, Bob.
Woelf, I hear you 100000000%!! I sleep from about 1130pm until 2 or 3am then until about 6am and I’m up. I am getting used to it as best I can but you and i both know there are season of desert and abundance in the world of words.
I sometimes wonder why I love writing. It’s torture sometimes. Then I write something good and I remember.
I think once my kids are little older it might get a bit easier. Most nights they end up in our bed and/or wakes up and need this or that or peed the bed, etc., you know what I mean. But the writing, and I don’t just mean my genre writing, is a way of slipping behind the veil of life and inspect it critically; you explore the emotions and actions of people and your own motivations, too, and you try your best to do it in the most poetic of ways, and that’s where the addiction lies.
This does sound much simpler. 400 words a day–that’s doable. 100,000 words a year–that is too; it just doesn’t sound like it.
Just changing from the “noble” 1,000 words each day to 400 makes me feel like it’s possible.
Do you think it’s also important to allow yourself to drop goals temporarily? For example, spend this year writing while basically ignoring your blog, then next year blogging while taking a break from the novel. (Instead of keeping the precarious balance of both.)
Goals are extremely important. They are not, however, the only thing. When life happens you have to set things aside and focus on what matters (family, the job that provides a living, etc.). From December last year through January of this year, I focused only my rewrite as I was in the process of sending it to an agent with edits. Work is crazy that time of year and I did not need the added pressure of posting each day. My blog followers dropped, but I expected that. Looking back I probably should have posted at least once a week because social media is vital to all writers professional or unpublished. In the end, however, if my blog gets in the way of my scant writing time, I have to let it go. I want to write novels, not blogs, though I enjoy blogging immensely.
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