Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Day 31 - End of Month One and Podcast Goodness

"On your deathbed, are you going to be proud of the novel you wrote? Or are you going to be proud that you watched The Office several times?"

Today, I didn't play Final Fantasy XIII. I wrote. What did you do today?

That was a major point that came out of the I Should Be Writing podcast I listened to while I wrote. It was good to see that other people came out of WorldCon having had the same epiphany that I had. You DO have time to be a writer. You just have to want it really, really badly.

Actually, this was the first podcast I had ever listened to and I was really happy with it. Perhaps some of that has to do with how much I love listening to Paul Cornell speak. He spoke about how realistic and ruthlessly honest feedback is really important if you want to improve your writing: "You need to find people around you who won't just say 'That's great'.", and about how rejection can make you stronger; "You become a better writer from being punched."
(That last comment was a metaphor and you shouldn't take this as Cornell-blessed advice to go punching your writers group to 'help them out')

So it's also the end of the first month of my challenge, and I am behind by quite a long way. I have 335 days left, and 964,834 words left, which comes out to 2,880 words per day. In percentage terms, I'm meant to be achieving 8.34% of my goal each month, and this month I've only reached 3.51%.

I say 'only', but if I keep going at 3.5% a month, I would reach over 400,000 words by the end of the year. That's the equivalent of 5 first draft category romances. At the moment, each percentage point is a celebration.

And honestly, if you're going to be 5% behind in your goal, you want it to be at the beginning! Still lots of time to catch up ^_^

Word count - 2,904

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