Habit forming and NanoWriMo
It is no secret that I have been very negligent of this blog over the past few weeks and months. After the roll out things were going well, but Summer came and had a completely different plan for me. I won’t go into the details of who what when where and why, as it’s not relevant to this post. But what is relevant is that this summer has been the summer of cleaning up the mess, both on a literal and a figurative levels. It’s been a busy summer, an exciting summer, a scary summer, and more. But as the season winds down and we roll into the heart of fall, it’s time to start moving ahead.
The mess is almost cleaned up. It’s not done yet, but it’s almost gone. It will return, but when it does, I will be far more ready to handle it.
The craziness of the summer pulled me away from my writing and my Magic Spreadsheet chain has broken more than once and I have either fallen out of old habits that I wished to maintain, or failed to properly build new habits I wish to see take hold.
Enter NaNoWriMo
For the record, No. I will not be participating in Nano. At least not officially. I will not be starting a new piece of fiction on November 1 with the goal of having 50,000 words written on it by November 30. For those of you who are, I wish you the best of luck. But that is not what I need right now. Right now I need consistency. So my goal for Nano is to produce at least 500 words each and every day.
On top of writing 15,000 words in November, I plan to begin work on revisions to the second book in the Slipspace Trilogy and continue production on the audio of Book 1. It won’t all get done this month. But it’s not supposed to. For me, this NaNo is not about Quantity over Quality. It is not about Quality over Quantity. It is about consistency and habit forming. It is about –
Getting into a daily word count practice
Writing and posting at least one blog post per week on a regular and predictable schedule
Starting the edits on the next manuscript
Continuing the work on audio production
With a full time day job, this may be a tall order, but it is one that I believe I can achieve and with any luck at all, after 30 days I’ll not only have developed some good habits once again, but I will also have improved my time management skills.
I encourage you to take this journey with me over the month of November. I encourage you to set out some goals for yourself and use them to develop new or strengthen your existing habits. Whether it’s writing every day on your way to 50K, or making sure you get enough sleep each night, or getting a regular exercise schedule, let us all make November 2014 a month of strong habit formation. Please feel free to comment on what you’re planning to do and perhaps we will all find our ways to our respective goals, together.
Until Next week.
