Goals

Man! To paraphrase Lloyd Bridges "I picked the wrong month to start setting goals." Karin asks about the word count on The Unnamed Fantasy Book in the comments here. For the purpose of this conversation we'll call Karin "Bob" in this post. There's a reason for that which only SF geeks will know. Well, maybe writer geeks of all stripes. Anyhoo.Well, as you know Bob, the goal went poorly. I originally stated the goal was 31,000 words, and in fact I only have 6,000. Ouch! A few things went wrong, some under my control and some not so much. One was that my goal was 1,000 words a day, every day. That's a bad goal. A more reasonable goal is 1,000 words per weekday and assume my weekends are off-times. That would have lopped the goal to 23,000. Writing is work, I'm trying to treat it as a job, and that means I should be able to have days off.The other stupid thing is that I've found that as soon I perceive myself as "behind" then I just ostrich the problem away. As soon as I started saying "I'm behind - tomorrow I need to write 1500 words", the next day I would write nothing. Like clockwork. So I finally said, "OK, let's work together stubborn, stupid ostrich brain." The goal should be 1K words every week day, but it doesn't accumulate. That will mean an average of less than 20K words a month - say about five months for a first draft. Acceptable. I can hang with that. Words started flowing again.What's that Bob? Why did I only get 6K, when I'm saying the average should be 20K? Well, again as you know Bob, the "part-time" job was decidedly not part-time the last two weeks. Sucky to the goal to be sure, but they pay the bills (well metaphorically speaking), and we had a legitimate need for me to ratchet up the workload.So there we are. Some mockery is order, I asked for it, and I'll take it. But overall I think it's a good program. So let's say we should have 20K words in June - that would put us at 26,000 words come July 1st. Check back in a month :-)As for other goals, I talked about my new exercise regime a while back and noted I was losing a half-pound a week. I just did the May numbers and they didn't look good. I averaged only losing 1/10 of a pound in May :-( I'm not entirely sure why. One part is that I hit a wall in the program - I stuck for three weeks on rung 11 of the program, only because of the sit ups. I reached a point where none of the program felt like much of an effort, but those damn sit ups were killing me. I finally went on to rung 12 feeling like I still wasn't ready for two more situps but I wanted the extra push-ups, jogging steps, and so forth. I also skipped more days than I should have. Still I said it wasn't about weight loss, and it it isn't, not really. I'm still down about 7 pounds from the beginning of February, and I'm still losing, so I'll press on.

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