IWSG: The Goal Achieving Edition (#20)

Insecure Writers' Support Group (IWSG) is a really awesome meme that you should be doing along with the rest of us writers. Unless you truly are happy with your writing and don't feel the need to vent about your insecurities because they don't exist for you. But, really.... Don't they?  
IWSG is hosted by Captain Ninja Alex at his blog, Alex J. Cavanaugh.

That's right. I made a New Year's Resolution back in January and I just reached it! I set out to write 93,500 words of fiction for the year and reached 93,692 just last Saturday. I know it's not a lot of written words for the average writer who probably writes twice that in any given year, but it is a lot for me.

It honestly wasn't that hard to achieve, which is why I set it. I knew if I just wrote a few hundred words a day, I would make it, so that's what I did. I couldn't write every single solitary day, but most of the time I wrote more than just a few hundred words, so skipping some days was easy to do.

I also am finally writing a new original story that doesn't make me lose sleep at night. I find most of my manuscripts give me insomnia and make my life miserable for some reason, but my current work-in-progress is not provoking anxiety in me. All I can say is "YAY!" to that because this has been a problem for over a year now. I'm just so thrilled to be writing something I don't have to freak out over and can hope to actually finish and publish. (God-willing, right?)

It's nice to have some writing victories for a change! Onwards to 2016 and that '1 million words' lifetime word count! Are any of you finally conquering some of your writing demons for a change?

Happy 4th of July & Checking-in with Goals

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

Besides acknowledging my country's day of declared independence, I figured it was also a great opportunity for me to check-in with myself to see how I'm doing on my New Year's writing resolution/goals. Now that the year is officially HALF over (that was fast!), I need to see how I'm doing on this front.

So far, I have written 55,287 words since January 1st, 2015. For me, and I stress the word "me," this is pretty amazing. I've never written so many words within the first six months of any year, so that is an accomplishment. My goal is to reach a minimum of 93,000 words by the end of the year, so I can see that I'm already slightly more than half-way to that goal at the half-way point of the year, so I'm on-track to meet it.

Although, I admit I've been slacking off on my writing as of late. June was a horrendous month for me and I was sick with strep throat. I'm still trying to completely get over that, but I think I can get some writing done now. Hopefully, I can at least do that for the remainder of the week and I'll just have to see how next week shapes up.

Perhaps I'll check in with myself again at the 3/4-mark of the year. I suppose there's nothing like checking in on yourself to motivate you to keep up with your yearly goals.


How is everyone else doing with their yearly writing goals?
 

New Year's Resolution

This award is so perfect for me! I didn't make this, but I decided to bestow it upon myself, nonetheless. I am definitely the type of writer inclined to be slow. So, with a new year and the tradition to start a new path that is better than the old one from last year, I've decided to set an intention to write everyday.

I realized that if I were to write at least 300 words a day for the entire year, I would have over 100,000 words completed by the end of the year. That's not hard! That's so doable, so this is what I'm intending to do for the year of 2015. 100,000 words written is great for one year, especially for a slowpoke like me. Maybe I'll be able to make this award not apply to me anymore.

The most important trick to making this work is to set a low word count that is so easy to meet everyday, there's no excuse not to do it. Like brushing your teeth twice a day, which takes so little time and reaps huge benefits compared to never doing it. Also, write any sort of fiction, even if it's just free-writing or fanfiction. It all counts toward your overall word count goal for the year, and you can worry about writing a best seller later. Most of what we write as fiction authors never sees the light of day, anyway, so just write!

Happy New Year to everyone! 

Any New Year's Resolutions for you writers out there?