I started September so strong. I had these BIG PLANS for the month, I was riding high on my own ability to squeeze everything in and make it all work. The funny thing is, I do this to myself ALL THE TIME. I hit the end of the month and look back on everything, letting myself celebrate the little victories and telling myself the next month is a chance at PERFECTION again. Yes, it’s HARD to be perfect … but every month I tell myself it’s POSSIBLE.
It’s not. It never is. I’m not sure why I keep telling myself it is.
I think if I could accept that GOOD ENOUGH is perfect, everything would be a bit better. As it is, I get behind by just a little bit and completely derail. I think, I missed my word goal yesterday by 500 words. So I guess I shouldn’t even bother trying today. Perfect is no longer attainable.
It’s irrational, I know.
But I can spend entire days in this mindset.
You’ve known me for a long time (if you followed this blog from the beginning) and this is the most I think I’ve ever explained my “irrational perfectionism”. It’s hard to talk about, mostly because admitting I stopped working on those goals for even a single day is a HUGE failure and perfectionists HATE FAILURE. Obviously, it makes no rational sense to stop trying because you see failure looming … yet I do it month after month.
So, welcome to my mid-month check in. I’m going to be HONEST today but also positive. Let’s get into it, shall we?
I wrote for 10/20 days this month (including today). Not great, but better than nothing.
Those 10 days accounted for 15,817 words so far. Most of those words were on the Apocalypse Project. So let’s talk about that. If you follow the blog you’ll likely know I was basically STUCK on this project for awhile (ahem: months) but I couldn’t figure out what was happening with it.
Well, I think I found the problem (again).
Without giving away spoilers, let’s say this entire situation Ivy and Nolan find themselves in (last two people on earth, etc) was CAUSED by someone. The scenes I kept getting hung up on all related to small details that, on first glance, would seem IMPOSSIBLE (or at least improbable) even in this situation. I had an outline, I knew the twist, so I KNEW they were possible. But I needed to think through those scenarios that came first. They’ll never appear in the story, they’re not even really flushed out. However, now that they’re written I’m unstuck again. I have enough background information to let the story flow the way it is supposed to. Pretty exciting.
As for reading, I feel like I’m in a reading slump right now, which is a weird feeling for someone who values reading as much as I do. I’ve only finished two of the books I needed to get through for September, which isn’t great because that leaves me less than two weeks to finish the one I’m on and read an entire book. Part of the problem, I think, was that one of the ones I finished was a slow book with plot issues. It was quite a drag to get through the whole thing. Hopefully, now that I’m onto a book that’s exciting me I can get back on track.
I should mention I also finished three audiobooks in this time, so not a total loss as far as total numbers of books finished goes.
Anyway, that’s the update. Unstuck on the major WIP but everything else sort of slowly limping toward October.
Talk soon! Maybe I’ll even have better progress to report next time.
Leave a Reply