{"id":250,"date":"2020-01-09T03:56:39","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T03:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/?p=250"},"modified":"2020-01-09T03:56:39","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T03:56:39","slug":"heading-into-2020-by-challenging-myself-to-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/2020\/01\/09\/heading-into-2020-by-challenging-myself-to-write\/","title":{"rendered":"Heading into 2020 by Challenging Myself to Write"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The year of 2019 was pretty much a total waste for me as I\nstruggled with heath issues and so when I started to come out of the fog a few\nweeks before the holidays I decided that 2020 was going to be my year. I was\ngoing to find ways to be productive, stop being so hard on myself, and just do.\n<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

               <\/em>It\u2019s\ntime to stop focusing on the failure that was selling my first book and to look\nforward to the future. So what it didn\u2019t sell, it was a memoir of a nobody,\nwhat did I expect? Time to buckle down and write something someone actually\nwould want to read and get on with my life! Still, I really do want to earn an\nactual living income on writing someday so I\u2019d have to come up with a game\nplan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

               I read\nsome articles and listened to some podcasts on novel writing and basically\nthere seemed to be a golden threshold everyone kept mentioning \u2013 that once you\nreach twenty books you should be able to make a stable 50K a year because as\nthey repeat over and over, \u201cThe best way to sell a book is to write another\nbook!\u201d  Twenty books?? <\/em>That seems\nlike it\u2019d take years<\/em>. But then I decided I was looking at the big\npicture when what I needed to be doing was looking at the small picture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Honoring Echo<\/a> took me four agonizing months to write and the reason it took me that long was because much of the second half of it was personal and distressing, reliving trauma is not really the most healthy thing in the world. But with that being said four months still wasn\u2019t bad for one book! If I could keep up that pace on other projects I could write three books in a year! And that\u2019s a great start. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

               I knew\nthat on \u201cbad\u201d writing days where I wrote something but not a lot, I tended to\nhave around 2,000 words. So, I made a New Year\u2019s Resolution to write 2,000\nwords on every day I didn\u2019t have a migraine. If I succeed and write only 2,000\nwords each day, the potential to have enough raw material for ten <\/em>novel\nlength books is there at the end of a year! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

               The\nother reason I never finished another book aside from Honoring Echo was that I tend\nto have terrible writer\u2019s block and burn out when I focus on only one project.\nSo to alleviate this I decided that my 2,000 words didn\u2019t have to be in one\nmanuscript at a time. They could be part of any of the several manuscripts I\nhave open, or a short story I can throw in a pile and string together in an\nanthology later, or even a novella or children\u2019s book. Or I could count blog\nentries which are also useful in a completely different way. It doesn\u2019t matter,\njust write. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

               <\/em>And\nyou know what? Since starting this I have done really well! It\u2019s been one week\nand this how it panned out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wednesday: OK I totally spaced on the first day, have no\nidea what I wrote or how many words it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thursday: Nothing. I had a migraine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friday \u2013 I wrote one random short story with 1,904 words<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saturday \u2013 I blogged 1,740 words and added 2,105 words to my\nmanuscript Milking the Cat for a total of 3,845 words. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sunday \u2013 I again focused on Milking the Cat adding 2,194\nwords<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Monday \u2013 I started my day writing an 843-word entry in my Dream\nLog which may or may not be worth publishing once I get enough dreams written\ndown. And then I had a very productive day with Milking the Cat adding 4,051\nword for total of 4,894 words. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tuesday \u2013 I ended my first week with 1,254 words in Milking\nthe Cat and 580 in various blog entries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The week\u2019s final total was 14,671 words! I\u2019m shocked and exhilarated\nbecause it was not as hard as I thought it would be it was just a matter of\nsetting up the time and saying I was going to do it. Far from hitting writer\u2019s\nblock I have ideas racing through my mind as I put them on notes for use later.\nAnd I know I could have written more if I decided to. The reason I am focusing\non Milking the Cat is because it\u2019s a nonfiction about the funny animal stories\nthat have resulted from my unusual life. As such it\u2019s really easy to get into\nand just slam out \u2013 unlike fiction which takes more thought. Even so I look\nforward to that too! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So here we are \u2013 2020 \u2013 it\u2019s going to be the year I get back on my feet come hell or high water. Oh, and did I mention my second New Year’s resolution was to post a new Glen the Caterpillar<\/a> comic every Wednesday? So far so good! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s 2020 and I have vowed to write 2,000 words a day – here’s how the first week went. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,3,91],"tags":[48,186,185,55,183,102,39,179,184],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-publishing","category-writing","tag-author","tag-becoming-an-author","tag-novel-writing","tag-publishing","tag-write","tag-writers-life","tag-writing","tag-writing-challenge","tag-writing-goal","wpcat-2-id","wpcat-3-id","wpcat-91-id"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2020\/01\/wings-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRChu-42","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":253,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions\/253"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}