Project 30 Challenge, Wrap Up
Well, I'm way past the 30 day mark, and I only actually made it to the 9 day mark. What a way to show the world how completely incompetent I am at finishing things.
So here's what happened:
I was waiting until the last second each day to both write and write up my blog post, meaning I wasn't starting until bedtime, and which means I was staying up far too late, which means I was exhausted by the time I hit day 10. The problem is, I feel the most creative after dark, which is fine when I don't have to get up at 6, but as a working woman whose 9-5 is really 7:00-3:30 that's not really possible. So I was grinding myself down, which is not healthy.
I realized that with what I wanted to do for the story, Roselia was not the right point of view character. She was already a believer, and to really explore things I needed to be writing from the non-believer's side. Which meant restarting, and that was just not what I wanted to do.
The pace I was writing was far too slow. I am not a slow drip writer who can skate by on 100 words a day. I am a binge writer who needs to be writing in big chunks to keep the momentum and the pacing and the flow going. If I am not writing enough in a session or day, then I lose focus and lose the idea. I've been like this forever. All through grad school when I had to be writing 3k a week, instead of doing a little bit every day I would binge it all in one or two days. My advisor noticed and thought it was interesting, since he didn't get student writers like that very often. So only being able to get a few hundred words in at a time meant I lost track of where things were going, and couldn't hold the scene and story in my head long enough to finish.
Have I told you I once wrote a novel start to finish in 3 weeks? That's my current first draft record, and it feels like I'm always chasing that goal. The longest I think I've taken for a first draft was somewhere between 3 and 5 months. I mean, I've been doing NaNoWriMo every year since 20071! For me, the first draft should not take very long to bang out. So I kept trying to accept the idea that this novel was going to take a very long time and it just wasn't sitting right with me.
Fridays after work are usually my "do nothing" days. I get off work after a long week, and I just don't want to do anything. Saturday is for doing things. Friday is for recovery. So when day 10 was a Friday, I ended up not doing anything writing related, and then day 11 I was out of the habit2 and and by day 12, with everything else listed above, I was basically done.
So, there's my confession. All that work and all that inspiration and it blew away like a dandelion in a stiff breeze.
Thoughts to share? I have a contact page now!
I haven't won every year, of course, I'm not that good at picking projects and sticking to things, but I've been doing it so long that "a draft should take one month" is basically carved into my brain tissue at this point.↩
Why is it that good habits take ages to form and a single bad day to break, but bad habits can be made in a few days and take ages to break?↩