NaNoWriMo 2019: Week 3

As it usually happens, I hit my major hiccup around the 15th. That's the point where you realize the month is half over, and no matter what you push out of the way, you may still fall short of the finish line. Of course, that shouldn't stop anyone from continuing to write, so I got myself back on track and the words are still coming out--just not at the lightning pace I would need for 50k.

If you haven't been following the daily updates, here is what you have missed:

Day 15, 16 & 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21

That's all. Time to get back to work. 

#NaNoWriMo 2015: DAY 4

I've hit that spot in the month where I seem to lack motivation if I'm not able to tackle a few paragraphs before noon. What I need to watch out for is the slip into the attitude where I say, "Oh, please. I have PLENTY of time to finish my novel We're only x number of days in." I'm pretty sure I've said that on the 25th before with more than 20k words left to write. And that's why after participating for over ten years, I've only won once.

Yes, quality should matter above quantity. But you need the quantity (and by this, I mean more than the zero words I've written today) to sculpt it into quality. So, off to write I go.

Publishing Year One: It All Starts with a Dream

As the one year anniversary of Unfolding Life being published is fast approaching, I thought this would be a great time to reflect on the process that it took to get there. With any writing project, you soon realize that the actual writing is only a fraction of the whole process. Once you decided to put in the work it is a long road to getting there, but you will get there with persistence. It all starts with your motivation. 

 

Finding Motivation

I need to confess that my motivation for publishing Unfolding Life was not simply to share my work with the world. It wasn’t because I thought that my skills at writing haiku were above average. And it certainly wasn’t to impress anyone. My original motivation for publishing this book of haiku was mostly for funding future projects. More specifically, I wanted to make enough from book sales to hire an editor for my next project. 

This doesn’t mean that my book wasn’t the best work I could put forth. And it doesn’t mean that I just slapped it together without careful thought about each decision I made. I took the time and the effort to take the best writing I had at the time and make it into the best project I could produce. Of course as every writer knows, you produce your best work right after you send out a submission or publish a book. It happens every time, and it is what keeps you writing (or banging your head against a wall) until the wee hours of the morning. 

After having a published work for nearly a year now, I understand that motivation is a big part of the whole process. Maybe if my motivation had been more about the work and less about the bottom line, I may not have slacked off on promoting it when I had to face the fact that my sales flatlined within days of publishing. I would have also tried to get more creative with my promotion—after all, there’s a whole big world out there and my promotions were strictly limited to online avenues. 

Tomorrow, I’ll discuss the preparation that went into Unfolding Life and what the process taught me.