On Setting Daily Goals
Sun 2006-07-09 16:38:47 (in context)
- 51,743 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 18.75 hrs. revised
Hello. This is what we call the Spectator Sport of Professional Writing. Since this past week has been utterly dismal for productivity, I'm going to invite y'all (all, what, three or four of y'all?) to put the pressure on. What I'm going to do is this: I'm going to post my goals for the day right here. At the end of the day, I'm going to update the blog entry to reflect success or failure. In case of failure, y'all are allowed to laugh at me.
This is an important job, the laughing. I need to start outsourcing the failure-based ridicule and smack-talking. I've discovered of late that I can't both write and hold up the carrot-and-stick contraption. For one thing, the contraption takes two hands to hold up. Carrot, stick. Hand, hand. For another, it's hard to write when you're busy flagellating yourself for not writing. So. From here on out, it's my job to write and it's your job, should you choose to accept it, to weild the mule-driving devices.
There we go. Now. Goals for Sunday, July 9 (oh, crap! it's the 9th already) are as follows:
- 3,000 words on the freelance gig (1300/3000 complete as of 1:36 AM)
- Stick my head in CritiqueCircle.com and contribute as appropriate (complete as of 11:52 PM)
- Revise chapters 3 and 4 of Golden Bridle as needed and email to beta reader(s) (Rescheduled, in a fit of realism, as of 12:00 AM, for Monday)
Update, 1:43 AM: Well. Don't I just suck. Fiddlesticks, fudge, and fubar. Thing is, I've got an easy thousand-words-an-hour rate of progress when I'm writing fiction, sure, but fiction doesn't require research. Freelance gigs do. And sometimes the research they require makes the writer go, "What the flying bleep, exactly, do they want me to say?" And then the writer spends a lot of time looking things up.
And taking multiple video game breaks.
Anyway, today was at least more productive than yesterday. And tomorrow will be better, because A) less video game breaks, and B) not so much of the farting around until late afternoon.
Look for a brand new goal-oriented bloggity by nine-ish.