Starting blocks

Whew, I’ve been wearing my ‘parenting’ hat* all day and I almost forgot to write my weekly blog update! We couldn’t have that, now, could we?

Today, my kids were all home from school so it felt like part of the weekend. Not that there’s anything wrong with that… except that I don’t even try to write on weekends anymore. I figure that since writing has become my Monday-Friday day job, I should be fully present on weekends and not be an overachiever/workaholic** who disappears to spend time with imaginary characters instead of my actual family.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I’ve spent the last couple of months creating an outline for my novel, and this week I was scheduled to start writing my new draft. Well, I’m happy to report that I’ve been hitting my goal of writing 1000 words every day and this draft is well underway! Even without writing today, I’ve got 4378 words done and I’ve finished the first section of the first chapter of my book.

Go me!

It wasn’t easy; Monday was a rough and faltering writing day, with heavy procrastination and stress before I hit my word count target. As the week went on, though, I started to build up some energy. Hopefully all my motivation and confidence is not going to be completely drained away this weekend, because I hate to think that next Monday morning might require another kick-start back into productivity. I’m super happy to have started this draft, but I don’t want my weekends to block my hard-earned momentum.***

On a slightly more disappointing note, I did virtually no work on my short story “Rabenmutter” this week. I had planned to fix this up to submit to a literary magazine’s contest by the November 30th deadline, but now I’m not sure that’ll happen. I know that wouldn’t be the end of the world, but you know how I feel about deadlines! We’ll see. Maybe I’ll find some time this weekend to polish the story’s language and fix up its not-quite-working ending.

*Not actually a hat.

**Yeah, fine, sometimes I still write on weekends too. But it’s usually before the kids wake up or when they’re playing video games. What can I say, my imaginary characters can be very compelling!

***Get it? Starting… block? Ok, it’s a stretch. But I got to use a photo of Usain Bolt, so that should provide inspiration to us all. Also, apologies for the wackiness of this post; too much hands-on parenting has a weird effect on my writing style.