Defining Success

I am at the point in my writing career where it can be very difficult to feel successful. Even my wins are so pathetically small that it can feel embarrassing to think of them as successes.

There are so many ways to measure success in the publishing industry—number of published projects, audience and notoriety, copies of books sold, literary prizes and awards, number of new dollars in my bank account, etc. If all those metrics apply to you, awesome, you’re a champ!

If very few of those metrics apply to you, hello, you are my people.

The metrics that a writer uses to measure success in their writing career can also vary for time scales. My goals for right now are (hopefully) different from what they’ll be in twenty years. And slightly differently, my short-term goals are always pretty piddly, but I have bigger aspirations for the long-term (thus the twenty years comment). I can’t expect myself to have massive sales, a huge audience, etc, all at once, even after I’ve had more time to build my brand; rather, I use my short term goals and measurements to build up to those larger successes.

Everyone’s measurements for success are going to vary because everyone’s reasons for writing vary. Some write to put bread on the table, some to be famous, some because it’s cathartic, some to quiet the eldricht duckie god who commands them. Your reasons for writing are a mix of motives that are unique to you. It’s worth taking the time to assess your own motivations and to come up with your own metrics, especially if, like me, you’re struggling to feel successful.

So in that spirit, I use the following yardsticks for success at this moment in my career.

A successful day: I wrote today. Hooray!

A successful week: I wrote more days than I didn’t. I connected with other literary folk, whether in my online writing group, on Twitter, or in person. I made progress on my current writing projects. Hooray!

A successful month: I wrote more days than I didn’t. I connected with other literary folk, whether in my online writing group, on Twitter, or in person. I made progress on my current writing projects, and shared parts of my work that I needed help on with other writers. I met my monthly literary goals by reading at least two books and making at least one submission for publication. Hooray!

A successful year: I wrote more days than I didn’t. I connected with other literary folk, whether in my online writing group, on Twitter, or in person. I made progress on my current writing projects. I met my annual literary goals by reading at least twenty-four books, making at least twelve submissions for publication, and completing at least three novel-length drafts of writing projects. I shared edited drafts of this year’s projects with beta readers and thoroughly considered their feedback when planning future drafts or publication plans. Hooray!

And that is it! You’ll notice I didn’t include sales numbers, followers amassed, or agent requests. I definitely could include those things, and that’s awesome if you do, but I am at the point where using metrics that involve other people and their ability to make choices just plain depresses me. I feel happier (and am therefore a more productive writer) when I don’t make goals or use measurements that are outside of my control. I dearly hope to some day make enough progress in my career that I do consider those things, but just not yet. (This isn’t to say that I don’t sell writing or hear back from agents or win awards. I simply don’t use those things are measurements of my progress. They’re just a reeeally nice pat on the back that I soak up like a sad, shriveled little sponge baby.)

How about you fine readers? What are your metrics for success as a writer? How closely do those metrics correlate to where you are in your career, and do you have “aspiration goals” that you’d like to meet in the future? Let me know in the comments below!

And until next week, happy writing!

Reblog: Sketchbook

Greetings, friends! Another month of Camp NaNoWriMo has snuck up on us! And you know what that means: reblogs and fluffy filler posts! Huzzah!

Instead of my typical reblog this week, though, I thought it would be fun to share a video. I enjoyed this one recently about building creative habits–maybe daily writing, maybe flash poetry, and maybe sketching. Flex those creative muscles!

See you again next week! Happy writing!

The Three A’s of Isolation Motivation

Last week, I managed to sneak out a little time between one child explosion and the next to meet up over video call with the local chapter of my writing guild. There were only four of us on the call, but it was so nice to see other humans, let alone other writing humans.

We talked about how we were doing and what we’d been up to and how much or how little our lives had changed since the last meeting. And, of course, we talked about our writing projects.

I… haven’t been doing much. I’ve been slowly chipping away at the cookbook, but at this point, that involves more playing around in the kitchen than any actual writing. Another project of mine is in review right now and so I haven’t really been doing much on my end while I wait to hear back from the folks checking it over to make sure it’s right for the organization. And the rest of my freelance gigs have dried up as people realize maybe now is not the time to expand their now-closed-for-who-knows-how-long business. So for writing—real, true, and actual butt-in-chair writing—there really hasn’t been much. Normally, that wouldn’t slow me down, because fiction is way more fun than gig work anyway, but as it turns out, having constant human presence of the small and needy type saps most of my energy in general, let alone creative energy.

But nobody wants to admit that to the guild members! It looks so- so- so unprofessional. *writhes in pain* (We’re not even going to talk about how unprofessional it looked when, halfway through the meeting, there was a sudden crash and a yell and I went bounding out of the room, only to sprint back twenty seconds later with a rushed No-one’s-dead-but-I-gotta-go-bye. Aaaand then I missed the Leave Meeting button twice, with accompanying false start lunges for the door, before I managed to actually hit it and go. Yep. Totally pro.)

So I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how to get a little more writing in. (And no, for purposes of definition, blog writing in this case does not count. Boo.) I feel like I have to tread this ground again every time there’s a big shift in my life, whether that’s seasonal changes, major life events, employment status, mental or physical health belly flops, or, in this case, apocalyptic pandemics.

I should probably be grateful that this keeps coming up. It’s really hard to ever get in a rut if my entire life gets upended every three months. But on the other hand, it always seems like writing is the first thing to get pitched out the window whenever there’s a transition, and it’s sometimes weeks before I right myself again and get back on course.

We learned a little while ago that writing prompts are pretty hit-or-miss with getting me going again. So what can I count on to help me get back into writing? For me, at least this time around, it’s been important to make sure I have the Three A’s:

Attainable Goals This has been an important one for me lately. This Camp NaNo month’s attainable goal is eight thousand words. Jill-on-a-good-day finds this wildly, embarrassingly inadequate. But Jill-on-the-other-twenty-nine-days-of-the-month finds this just baaaarely doable. I am not at a point right now where I can crank out 2k a day, but that doesn’t mean I should throw my hands up and despair. Having attainable goals helps me to keep moving forward, even if those steps are small. All progress is good progress.

Actionable Plans Having a goal is fantastic but having an idea of how to achieve it is even better. 8k words for the month comes out to 267 words per day. If I can squeeze out my 267 a day, whether that’s when the kids are falling asleep or while they’re out at recess or, yes, while I’m sitting in the bathroom pretending to use the toilet (dignity has long since left the premises), then I can make my 8k. If I miss a day, then I call in reinforcements and beg my ever-patient husband to take the kids on a walk or something so I can play catch-up. Have a plan. Stick to it.

Accountability Buddies Speaking of ever-patient partners, have someone who knows your goals and your plans who will gently poke you with a cattle prod every now and then. Have more than one person. Heck, tell the entire internet. But if I have a goal that only exists in my head, it’s pretty easy to decide I’m too tired to work on it today, or I should probably do the dish mound instead, etc. Accountability buddies keep you going when you’d stop on your own. Get some.

Need some more A’s in your life? Here’s a bonus A: Art is not just writing. I like to beat myself up when I’m not hitting my writing goals, or when my goals are tiny and pathetic, but the truth is that any enjoyable creative endeavor helps me feel less like I want to whack my hand off with a meat cleaver and lie down in the shower to die. It might be cooking an elaborate meal. It might be dancing with my boys. It might be drawing complex geometric sharpie doodles on my arm. If it stimulates my brain as I create something beautiful, it is an art and it is good for me. Maybe I can’t write while the kids are tearing around the house screaming about their latest and greatest Magic: the Gathering achievement. But I can practice ukulele through that. And I sometimes have to accept that that is enough.

Sooo… I guess that makes Acceptance our fifth and final A, haha.

I hope you guys are hanging in there. Do what you can and have mercy for the rest. And if you can manage to squeeze it in, happy writing!

Writing Through the Holidays

Ugh, sorry I didn’t post Monday. I was clinging to doorposts while my husband tried to drag me to the hospital. (I mean, seriously, who wants to die in a hospital when you can be noisily dying at home under a heap of plague-riddled blankets with fifteen half-drunk canteens of 100% guaranteed health tonic you got from that hippie under the bridge last June? Duh.) But after five days of my life passing before my eyes (rather boring, really), I’m on the mend and able to sit up at my computer without weakly flopping over sideways toward the toilet. Yaaaaay.

So! Maybe next time I’ll post about writing through illness (hahahahahahaha), but today I wanted to talk about writing through the holidays. Here in Americaland, October through January is like one nonstop party, hopscotching from one celebration to the next for pretty much three months. At least here in Alaska, I think we’re just happy at this point that nobody’s frozen to death, and then that oh-thank-heaven, the earth is starting to tilt back toward the sun again. (Seriously. Solstice is the best winter celebration of all.)

But all that partying can make it hard to squeeze writing in. I’m too busy babysitting vinho d’alho and wrapping presents in eco-friendly reusable swaddling clothes to write.

Wrong! I am never too busy to write!

Priotitize

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: your writing will get time according to its ranking in the priority list. So your first step in the plan of attack is to figure out your priorities! The priority list will of course swap around, especially around the holidays, depending on who’s in town, what’s going on, etc. But if you don’t prioritize your writing, it isn’t magically going to happen. This can seem a little cold at times. I mean, yeahhhh, I’ve been known to maybe sneak my laptop into the bathroom with me while family’s over to squeeze in an extra fifteen minutes of writing. (*mom peers anxiously at door, whispering, “Is she sick?”*) But knowing where writing stands in the pecking order is going to keep you from having unrealistic expectations of yourself. As much as we all want to, we can’t do it all. If you know and accept that it’s more important to you go to the Christmas concert with your cousins, then give yourself a pass and go to the concert. But maybe while the rest of the crew is watching that abomination live-action version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, that’s the time to sneak off with your laptop to the bathroom. It’s your call to make.

Plan

Once you’ve worked out your priority list for the season, then it’s time to plan out how you’re going to make it happen. (I’m assuming at this point that writing made the list…) You can go about the planning phase as casually or commando-y as you like. For those really into writing plans down, feel free to map out your schedule and hunt out all those sneaky little pockets of free time so you can stuff them with writing; ferociously cull down the time you spend on holiday shopping, chitchatting over hors d’oeuvres, or artfully wrapping gifts. Or, if you’re not feeling quite so hardcore, maybe just schedule yourself a half hour of quiet time each night before bed to knock out some words. (That’s what I do anyway.)

While planning, keep those expectations realistic. Nothing harpoons holiday zen like loading too much on your plate, so while you’re maybe normally able to blitz through 3k a day, give yourself a break if work is crazy and you’re on overtime every night until Christmas, of if you just want to spend a little more of that time with Nana. Goals don’t have to be huge or even difficult to be high-five worthy.

Execute

Do it! Stick to your plan, whether that means just quietly holding yourself to it, or roping accountability buddies into the loop. Both of my main writing buddies have end of the year writing goals and you know what? I just decided that I want to hop on that joyride too! So hey guys, I’m gonna finish the Cinderella thing by the end of the year! Watch me work! And I’ll be sure to litter the path to glory with little prizes for all my hard work. Because I am actually a mule and I only work for sugar cubes.

Holidays don’t mean you have to take all your writing and stuff it in the sock drawer until you guiltily pull it out along with some shiny new resolutions come January. With just a little extra prioritizing and planning, you can keep working right through the busiest time of the year. People like to go on and on about how the holidays are a good excuse- to forget your diet, to forget your budget, to drop all kinds of great habits that we spend the rest of the year developing. Hogwash, I say! No excuses! Keep eating healthfully, keep being financially responsible, and keep writing. If it’s important to you the rest of the year, it should be important to you the entire year. So don’t give up your writing just because Cousin Martha is throwing another Ugly Sweater Party. (Why do you still talk to her anyway?) Keep up those good habits!

All season long: happy writing!

Stealth Workouts

Twice a week, I find myself driving twenty minutes across town. I drop off a child. One hour later, I pick him up again. It’s not worth the gas to go home, and the place is pretty remote so there is nothing else within miles for me entertain myself with, except for a connected gym and a trampoline park which are both wildly overpriced.

When these appointments started, I would sit in the foyer on a squeaky plastic chair next to a fake plant and a table littered with board books, old issues of Highlights Magazine, and pamphlets about how to talk my kid out of doing drugs. I mostly chatted with the security guard or played solitaire on my phone, since I couldn’t ever seem to remember to grab a book, but if I was really on it, I would bring headphones and take French quizzes to win fake internet money with which I could buy little outfits for my avatar, a green cartoon owl named Duo.

It was low-grade terrible but could have been a lot worse. I could live with it.

Then, while spying on the security guard, I realized that of all the surveillance cameras he monitored—the halls of all three floors, the elevators, all doors in and out, several views of the parking lot—none of them were watching the stairwell. So with his blessing, I went to check it out.

Concrete steps with metal and rubber grills on the edges. Painted metal handlebars. Three dusty buckets of mysterious construction materials stuffed under the bottom flight. You know this stairwell, I’m sure. You probably have one at work, or your apartment building, or your doctor’s office. These are actually all the same stairwell, dimensionally connected across all space and time no matter where you enter or exit, from the florescent lights at the top to the patterned carpet at the bottom, covered with dust and the powdered remains of ten-year-old leaves, with maybe a skittle or two and a crumpled plastic juice bottle to liven up the scenery. You’ve been here before, but maybe you didn’t stay long because it looks like the kind of place that a homeless vampire from the 1700s might skulk while he tries to figure out where it all went wrong and what the heck ‘yeet’ is supposed to mean anyway.

Inspection thus passed, I sat thoughtfully in the foyer again the next visit. “You know,” I said to the security guy. “I should probably go walk stairs or something instead of just sitting here.”

“Do it.” He was probably tired of me hanging around making small talk while thumbing curiously through wall racks full of pamphlets about AIDS or safe sleeping positions for babies or how to make friends when you feel like nobody understands you. “You won’t be able to get back through the doors at the top of the stairs, but if you come back up before the elevator shuts down at five, it’s not a problem.”

Now, this building is literally connected to a gym. But as I have mentioned once or twice (or a thousand times), I am the cheapest of skates. I compare the price-per-ounce of every grocery I buy, every single week, just in case they went and changed it on me. I will always choose to languish sick at home an extra week than spend the ten dollars to see a doctor at my husband’s work’s health clinic. Every time. So why would I go to the gym when I have this perfectly serviceable creepy stairwell at my disposal?

It started out small. I clomped up and down the steps in my oversized winter boots for a quarter hour before coming back up to wait for the boy. But why stop there? If you have three flights of stairs, some buckets, and a pile of floppy plastic wall trim, you’re only limited by your imagination.

Things got more complicated. I started timing exercise sets on my phone—squats, stair sprints, planks, crunches, and so on. I wore tights and sports bras under my street clothes. I ditched the boots under the stairs. Then most of the outer layers of clothing as well. The workouts stretched in duration and intensity. But as that happened, I started to look more and more like a crazy person—especially considering that there was a fully equipped gym three feet away on the other side of the wall. I started to get self-conscious. Then, on the rare occasion that someone else was actually using the stairs to go up and down floors (who does that?), I started hiding. With the squeak and slam of a panic bar, someone else would come in the stairwell and I had moments to assess if they were above or below me, going up or going down, and then, drenched in sweat and wearing crazy tight pants and stripey socks, I dove beneath the stairs to squat pressed against the wall like a startled Gollum in a cave (except his hair is better than mine).

Then things started to get really weird. I mean, time is hard to come by and I’ve got a lot of stuff going on. I would do French quizzes while getting sick glutes on the stairs. I texted ladies from church about their ministering assignments and upcoming enrichment activities as I did wacky belly-dancing core workouts. I brought my laptop if I was behind on my word count for NaNo, and did this awful plank-while-sprinting thing where I had to get so many words before I could stop (which really just made for bad words and bad exercise form). I would max out the volume on my phone and listen to scriptures, running up three flights of stairs at a dead sprint while blasting the commandments of God handed down from Mount Sinai in this weird stairwell that I was making waaaay weirder by the day. I would do all these things in the same workout session, waiting for my kid to finish his appointment and never quite having enough time to finish everything I started. I was multitasking on a whole new level. And if that squeak-bang door announcement ever sounded, and it did at least once a session, I would instantly kill the volume and flee to the bottom of the stairs, squeezing down into a sticky ball of social anxiety wedged between a bucket of paint and a half-used box of powdered wall spackling, just add water.

I was being so incredibly weird, and I loved it. Man, it would have been miserable and mortifying if someone caught me at it, but good golly, it felt like I was getting away with a crime every time someone went through that stairwell and didn’t spot me. Just earlier today (no, this hasn’t stopped, and it’s not about to), I didn’t turn off my French quiz quite fast enough and the last echoes of “Avez-vous apporté-” were still sounding in the stairwell when someone came in. They paused, silent, then came uncertainly down the stairs. They paused again at the bottom of the flight, standing just before the door to leave.

Maybe they heard the labored breathing I couldn’t quite stifle. Maybe they could smell the scents of fresh sweat and discount-bin Lärabars. And then maybe they decided I was that 1700s vampire and it was best not to investigate. They left, leaving me feeling like I had just reached a whole new level of got-away-with-it rapture.

You know that NaNo Badge you can earn for writing where you probably shouldn’t? Oh yeah. Badge unlocked.

Trial Separations: When It’s Time for a Break

After writing last week about ways to keep your mind limber while on a writing break, I promptly went on a small week-long writing break. Thirty-one members of my immediate and extended family were in town, we were camping for days, and what had started as volunteering to pick up the food from the grocery story quickly morphed into me being in charge of all things food related. I had an absolute blast, but it just wasn’t feasible to be doing any writing work. (Thus I find myself last-minute typing this blog post up during my lunch break.) I hadn’t really planned be to taking a break, but it just happened. (Sorry, that-one-deadline.)

Breaks happen. Sometimes they happen when you plan for them to, like when I know I’m about to birth a human and I’ll need some time for my brain to readjust to endless screaming needs, or when I know I’ll be car camping on the side of the road without electricity for a week or more. At other times, breaks happen without warning or a plan, like when a computer suddenly breaks or there’s an emergency that needs immediate and full attention.

And then there are the in-betweeners. The breaks that happen maybe a little unexpectedly, maybe a little uncertainly. These are the breaks that don’t have to happen necessarily- you could probably keep writing if you really worked at it, but for one reason or another you don’t.

Deciding to take a break from writing is very personal and everyone does it for different reasons. I’m a big fan of powering through and writing every day, no matter how little, no matter what’s going on, but that doesn’t work for everyone. Heck, sometimes that doesn’t even work for me.

So here is a short list of some perfectly legitimate times when it might be appropriate to take a break.

Your life is busy and you have rent to pay.

The sun is shining and you haven’t left your cave in three days.

You’re feeling burnt out and are bored with the sound of your own writing.

You want a break.

If you find yourself in one of these situations, it’s totally fine to take a break. That’s right, even just wanting to take a break is a totally legitimate reason to take a break, and you don’t have to plan for it and schedule it in for it to be ‘allowed’. We writers can be a pretty miserable bunch- frustrated when we’re writing and frustrated when we’re not. I am the queen of hurling abuse at myself whenever I’m not living up to my own high standards.

It does not have to be this way. We would never treat other people like this, so why should we treat ourselves so poorly?

There are a lot of really good reasons to take writing breaks and sometimes those breaks are actually more beneficial than just powering through. Taking a break allows you to see your work with fresh eyes. It can refresh you mind and allow you to approach writing again with new ideas. It can fight burn out and help you relax (or pay for groceries, or visit your grandbabies, etc).

A break does not mean that you are quitting writing forever, or that you’re not a ‘real’ writer, or that you lack willpower. It simply means that now isn’t the best time for writing and you’ll get back to it when you have something to say and the time to say it. And until that time rolls around, don’t feel bad about taking a break. After a little recovery time, you’ll be back at the races and stronger for the time you spent on the bench.

Take care of yourself! Be kind to yourself! And- if it works out- happy writing!

Calendaring for the Win

This has been an off summer for me. Some of that was beyond my control, but enough of it is my own fault that I’ve become too disgusted with myself to continue like this.

As long time readers know, I do best when I’m organized. Check boxes are my friend. To do lists are my friend. Calendars are my friend. And yet, I realized just a few days ago that I’d let all those things slide. I wasn’t making a morning list. I hadn’t drawn an empty box in months. My desktop calendar was still on May.

With growing horror, I looked up at my submissions goal list, taped like an accusation on the wall over my desk. I was behind. Crazy behind. Where-I-should-have-been-in-March behind.

I have attention problems. If I don’t follow a routine, I’m led about by whatever shiny fun-o-matic catches my eye. And I haven’t been following my own tried-and-true writing routines for months. This is why coming up with blog posts has been such a slog. This is why last month’s NaNo was such a painful agony. This is why I have been spending well less than half my daily writing time actually writing. This is why I haven’t edited a single short story, let alone a novel, since last spring. I know what I have to do to keep on my writing goals. But I haven’t been doing those things.

Clearly, it’s time for some better housekeeping. I need quantifiable goals, and I need a finite deadline, and I need a plan for how those two meet. So this week, I sat down and carved out what needs to happen in the following months.

Reassess Goals I still have the goal of forty-eight rejections for the year; I now have less than half the time in which to do it, because if I want the rejections back by the end of the year, I should send them out a good twelve weeks before the end. So instead of a steady rate of six-ish submissions a month, I need to get out the remaining thirty-five submissions for the rest of the year by the end of September, assuming every single one of them is a rejection. I honestly don’t think that’s attainable, but if I can get out twenty-five submissions by the end of September, I’ll be pretty pleased with myself and hustle the last few out (maybe) before NaNoWriMo.

I also have the goals of two new first drafts and two second drafts. I did manage a first draft of Copper, and I started editing Seasong/Sacrifice/Whatever the Heck I’m Calling This Mermaid Thing, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten. I think sticking with the original goal is a little untenable at this point, especially given how much work I’ll have to put into submissions, so I’ll drop one of the editing goals and shoot for finishing a second draft of the mermaid story and drafting one more new story during NaNo. Maybe I’ll surprise myself and squeeze in that second second draft, but I’ll owe myself a box of cookies or something if I pull that off.

Set Exciting New Goals I have my annual AWG writing conference coming up in mid-September. Even though I’m preeeetty sure I’m not going to find an agent who wants to sit down with me for an hour and go over a five-page document, I would like to prepare a list of blurbs for all my novels with at least a complete first draft- bonus points for the nearly-done partial first drafts as well. I’ll need to finish by the time I leave for the conference, giving me not quite four weeks to come up with five more blurbs and to clean up the eight I already have. Totally do-able.

I also want to work up a blog schedule for the remainder of the year within the next two weeks, with titles and themes for each post- extra points for notes or first/partial drafts. The blog just feels less crazy and stressful (and stupid) when I’m prepared well in advance. Future Jill will thank me.

Streamline Writing Time I have gotten incredibly lazy about this, and this is probably the root of all my writing evils. Writing time is not the time to be playing games, and trawling the bowels of Twitter, and catching up on blogs and articles, and conducting ‘research’ because, gosh, a story with singularity bombs and human augmentation and ticklish lab rats would be really cool. Reading about writing is not writing. Writing is writing. So starting now, writing time is nine to ten-thirty. From nine to ten-thirty, I will only write, even if it means spewing stream of consciousness into the void for an hour and a half. If I have made good progress for the first hour, I can choose to spend the last half hour working on submissions or blog stuff, but for no more than two hours total in a single week. Any more than that will have to happen outside of writing time. In three weeks, I will reassess the situation.

Summon the Kraken Accountabuddies Along with calendaring and, oh I don’t know, goals, another thing I’ve let slide is frequent check ins with my accountability buddies. Summer is a busy time and it’s become hard for all of us to get together for our weekly internet write-ins. (And one of them decided to go and get married this weekend. Geez, so selfish.) But that doesn’t mean I can’t check in with them every now and then on my progress. I mean, we’re friends. It’s not like they’d see my name on their phone screens and roll their eyes to Heaven. (Right, guys? Right?) So I will drop a line or two in Google Chat or text or whatever at least once a week about writing. That is all. It’s easy so, like cleaning my writing time, I shall start this immediately.

*dusts hands together* Voila! A plan! I don’t know how achievable it is. I think the submissions thing is going to kick my butt, if nothing else. But this at least makes it possible, instead of just a looming nightmare cloud hanging over my head. And whether I hit my goals or not, I’m going to keep up with my calendaring, my listing, my check-boxing. They’re my best shot for getting anywhere in all this so I’m only cheating myself if I give them up. (Sorry, Future Jill. [Past Jill, you suck.])

I hope you guys are keeping up with your writing goals for the year so far! Until next time, keep your heads in the clouds and your feet on the ground! Happy writing!

Reblog: Daily Writing Routine

Howdy folks! It is now April, and that means it’s Camp NaNo season! Wahoo! I really need this, because I have been super lazy about writing the last few months and particularly the last few days. (Holidays. Holidays WRECK my writing system.)

Speaking of writing systems, the reblog this week is from our friendly neighborhood Well-Storied, about daily writing habits- the good, the bad, and the augh-why-does-it-hurt. Read Kristen Keiffer’s take on daily writing and decide if it’s right for you! Enjoy, and happy writing!

“Real writers write every day.”

Unfortunately, that’s a sentiment you’ll often hear in the writing world, and for a time, I subscribed to it myself. And while I still maintain a daily writing routine, I regret the days I spent telling other writers they should to do the same.

Every writer’s process is unique, and what works for one—or even many—isn’t guaranteed to work for you. And that’s okay! The important thing is to find the writing techniques that work best with your time, your skills, and your stories. Unsure if a daily writing routine would be a good fit for your writing process?

Allow me to share the pros and cons of my own experience with a daily writing routine today!

How I Built My Daily Writing Routine…

I’m far more of a storyteller than a writer. I enjoy plotting, creating characters, world-building, and the like, but the actual process of writing the dang thing is often like pulling teeth for me. And because of that, I’m prone to procrastinating my work.

A few years ago, my writing life was a mess because of this procrastination. I wouldn’t write for weeks at a time, until I grew so frustrated with my lack of productivity that I’d practically hurl myself into the work. Obviously, working with such intensity wasn’t exactly sustainable, and I often exhausted all of my creativity energy and motivation during these times.

I wouldn’t write again for weeks, and so the cycle repeated.

I knew I needed to find a way to stop procrastinating my work, to instead spread my creative energy out throughout the week, but I didn’t know where to start. That’s when I found Faye Kirwin’s Write Chain Challenge, a 30-day course designed to help you build a daily writing routine.

The course itself runs off the principal of a daily minimum. Every day, you must meet your daily minimum writing goal in order to add a link to your Write Chain. Fail to earn your daily link, and you break your chain and must start over.

This challenge seemed like the perfect way to revolutionize my messy writing life, and in February 2015, I began adding links to my Write Chain. After nearly three years of daily writing, I hit my 1,000th daily link earlier this month. One thousand days! 

Never in a million years would I have thought I could work on my writing for so many days in a row. But the practice wasn’t always easy, and it certainly wasn’t perfect…

To read the full article, click here!

The Great Annual Resolutions Post

Howdy, folks! Hey, look, we all survived another year! Wowza!

I made a few resolution shifts midyear last year. I switched over from the paper calendar system I had been using to a phone app called Habitica that is delightfully nerdy and keeps me on my toes. It taps into my love of check boxes, but then also has a built in reward system, so it works very well for me, and I think I’ll cling to it forever.

Overall, I had a good year, without too many dropped balls on my goals. My exercise goals got derailed every now and then by rugby injuries, and I jumped ship on a few writing projects, switching over to things that were more interesting at the time (because squirrel brain: the struggle is real). And as mentioned a few weeks ago, I did manage to scratch and claw my way to receiving Writer of the Year from the Alaska Writers Guild. But the goal I know you’re all just dying to know about: the rejections goal.

As you may recall from this post last year, I had a goal to receive at least forty-eight rejections. I counted short story submissions, queries, competitions- anything that pitted my writing against a slush pile. The final count is in aaaand… I failed! *sad trombone* As of December 31, I only tallied forty-four rejections.

I’m not being too hard on myself, because I still managed to achieve the two main objectives of the rejection goal: I got better at taking rejections as impersonal matters of preference, and I pushed myself to submit waaaay more than I usually do. As a result, I also had way more acceptances than I normally do! And as an added benefit that I hadn’t even anticipated, I had a super productive year for short stories too, because I had to make sure that I had fresh material to shop around as my old store of shorts got published. Overall, it was a very good year for my writing!

So I think I’m gonna stick with what works. I’ll keep with a forty-eight rejections goal for this year as well, since I felt really pushed and still didn’t quite manage to make the goal. I think I can hit it for reals this time! For novels, since I didn’t stick with the titles I had planned to work on, but still managed to get good work done with other projects, this year I think I’ll just drop the specifics altogether and just have a goal of two new first drafts, and a round of edits each for two first drafts from last year. I’ll work on whatever sounds most fun in the moment! I also plan to average one new short per month, although I don’t plan on worrying too much about how marketable they all are. And for daily goals, I plan a baseline of 500 words per day, and ten minutes of backshop, with Sundays off to rest my weary brain meats. I have goals for my spiritual, mental, and physical health as well, but that’s it for my writing goals.

Whew! All the things! I should have plenty to keep myself busy over the next year. I would love, love, love to hit that rejections goal, and maybe even outstrip this year’s number of acceptances. Heck, if we’re getting really pie-in-the-sky, I’d like to pick up an agent as well, haha, but that one’s a little less in my control. The only thing I can do is keep researching, stay consistent, and continue to hone my craft as much as I can. So that’s what I’ll do!

How about you fine folks? Any exciting new goals for this year? Let’s chat about them in the comments section! I’d love to know your plans!

Until next week, happy writing, and happy New Year as well!

Go! Speed Racer!

I did NOT look this happy at the end.

Here in Fairbanks Alaska, summer solstice is a big deal. I mean like eat-too-much, party-all-night, don’t-go-down-‘til-the-sun-does big deal. (I’ll let you figure out what time that would be.) And part of my solstice celebration this year included the Midnight Sun Run.

The Midnight Sun Run is a 10k race kicked off at 10pm. Depending on your cuppa, there can be costumes, alcohol, various pets, roller skis- you name it, it’s there. I even saw someone do the whole thing juggling on a unicycle one year. Another involved some really valiant attempts with a pogo stick. (A pogo stick! Who does that for over six miles? Heck, who does that for over six feet?) It usually draws something more than three thousand participants, although there’s no accounting for all the unregistered runners. This thing is big and goofy and weird.

To up the fun factor even more, Hubby and I decided on a little wager. The loser gets three hours of community service of the winner’s choosing- and does it while wearing an outfit of the winner’s choosing. Now, my husband gets pretty creative with this kind of thing. And I was yet to beat him at… well, pretty much anything. So I was absolutely determined to WIN.

And so I began the grueling, months long process of training.

This, like most of my life, has a correlation to writing. Sometimes, we get out of good habits. I was once in pretty decent shape. But <insert million excuses here> happened and I not-so-suddenly wasn’t. I similarly find myself out of the writing habit (as you may have noticed with this spate of late blog posts).

But giving up and accepting the new state as the always-and-forever is a huge disservice, to yourself and to the world! So, here’s my training schedule for the next several weeks.

Week 1: Write at least three hours

Week 2: Write something daily

Week 3-7: (Camp NaNo starts) Write 1k daily

Week 8-∞: Keep at it

Easy, right?

I suppose you want to know whether this training paid off. I suppose you want to know that I kicked my husband’s rear and made him work in a soup kitchen wearing a wrestling singlet and a tutu.

Except that I didn’t. 😦

This is the other point I took away from all this. Comparing myself to my incredibly athletic husband (or to the nine-year-old boy or the seventy-five-year-old woman who also kicked my butt) is pointless.

Did I improve? Yes. Do I feel fantastic? Yes. Did I beat my time goal? Yes.

I am me and no one else. I run as only I can run. I write as only I can write. And I am completely and utterly happy to be me, the best me I can be. (And I hope that’s true for you, too!)

So work hard to be your best, and don’t worry about how that stacks up with everyone else! Run without registering. Walk the entire way, or run so hard you pee your pants. Do the race while juggling on a unicycle. Forget comparisons and be your own best.

Happy writing!