21-Day Challenge: Days 11-13

Went a little silent there for a few days, sorry! As I mentioned in my last post – I was moving into my long work period in the day job. With minutes to write, it gets hard to put them into a blog instead of story words! Playing a little catch up today.

Thursday was Day 11. I arrived at work at 7am. I left work just before 1am on Friday. During that time, we had four new admissions, three of whom I had to manage all of the paperwork etc. for, solo. For those of you not working in the medical field: imagine an already busy 17 hour work day, into which is crammed an additional 3 hours of work. As a result, no words happened. I got breaks long enough to wolf down some food, but that was it. That was why I had Thursdays as a ZERO word day on the schedule, remember – because sometimes my Thursdays are like that. So I didn\’t fall behind, I just met expectations.

Day 12: Friday, I brought my word count total to 46,199 – about 1,100 words. More admissions at work, so even though I was only working one shift, I didn\’t have time to write anything during a break. Just words at home. And the at-home words were broken up because we\’re moving next Saturday, and I still had a lot of things to line up for the move. Finalized the movers; finalized the reservation of an elevator; stuff like that.

Yes, I\’m moving the day before I have the book scheduled for launch. Hey, Chris set the schedule for this program. Blame him. 😉

Speaking of Chris, HIS Day 12 finished his book at about 60k words. Which is AMAZING. He\’s done such a great job with this.

Day 13: I\’m 1900 words behind at this point. Not so good. But I\’m also writing SHORTER than I had scheduled. Much shorter. I think this book will wrap up at about 55k, and maybe expand a little during edits. So while I am behind my planned goal coming into the day, it\’s not a disaster. Knowing work was going to be tough again today, I hit the ground running before work and got in about 2500 words, putting my count to 48,687 words total. Now, to be on target I SHOULD have 51,500 by the end of Day 13. So I\’ve still slipped behind the target word count, but – this is life.

Life happens, and you roll with it. Notice, the ONLY day I didn\’t get words done was the one crazy busy 18 hour work day. Friday and Saturday were busy, but I still got at least some forward progress each day. And this is the thing: sometimes life will intervene, things will get crazy, and your targets will be missed. It\’s still important to find a few minutes to make some forward progress, though. Even if it\’s a single half hour sprint, or a couple of ten minute sprints. Get some words in.

By working every day, you continue to reinforce to your mind that This Is Important. You\’re keeping the mental momentum going. I know that if I stop writing completely for a few days, picking things back up again becomes harder and harder. In fact, the more days I stop writing, the more difficult it becomes to jump back in on a story. Writing something – even if it\’s just a little – is important.

Onward to catch up a bit on Day 14!

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