Yearly Challenges

So, generally this year I am undertaking two challenges. And now that it’s coming up to halfway through the year, or at least, it will be after this month, I thought I’d take a moment to see where I am with those.

Reading Challenge

The challenge – Read a book a week aka read 52 books in the year.

The last time I updated you on this progress was early March. Since then, there has been barely and reading done. So, this is going worse than poorly. I have read six books this year, and I should be on twenty two. That’s sixteen books difference, which is a lot.

So what’s going wrong? Time mostly. I seem to have a heck of a lot going on, between work, masters, writing, and social/gaming schedules, making time for reading is hard, especially when I do have downtime, I prioritise other things. Like a nap (because anaemia means I want to nap all the time) or writing, and reading is an effort to accomplish some of the time.

So, am I giving up? Of course not. What I plan to do is to read some graphic novels I’ve got on the side, because those take less time than a pure words novel, and hopefully if I just get a couple more books added onto the challenge, then I’ll start picking it up again. It’s not like I don’t have books to read, just haven’t been finding the time.

Writing Challenge

The challenge – Write 1,000 a day aka write 365,000 words in the year.

This is going better. January, February and March were basically on track. April was an immense month of epic words. May…not so good. I wrote about half of what I should have been, only 16,600 words. However, because of all the words I wrote in April, this does mean that overall for the year I’m at 168,000 words and I should be at 157,000. So in the grand scheme of things, I am ahead, however, the last month I only hit 1,000 words on five days, in the first half of the month.

So what went wrong? Scening. In one of the games that I am playing, my character has started a relationship with another character, and we are emailing each other in a back and forth to scene out their dates. It’s awesome, I’m loving it BUT it doesn’t count towards my word count total for the year, because it’s just for the two of it, and it’s connected to a game rather than writing. Which is a shame, because between the two of us, the scenes came to 133,000 words in the month. Yeah, we wrote a lot.

Hence, that’s taken up a lot of my time and energy. I wouldn’t have changed it, because it made me very happy and was awesome character development, however, this month we plan to be a little more relaxed about it, and I’ll be looking at my time management a little more, trying to find the delicate balance between everything I want to do.

It also helps that I have rediscovered enthusiasm for a couple of stories, it does come and go. I backed a kickstarter that will print custom text on a scarf for you (up to 40,000 words) so I’m going to be finished up a short version of Quiet Poison and get that printed up, so I’ve got to write a few more scenes, then tidy it up and send it off. Hopefully, if I get everything back on track, I can do that by the end of the month.

So the general gist of the last couple of months is keep going, don’t give up even if you fall off the rails a little bit. So I hope to come back to you all in another month or so with better reports. That, and I will be examining what I post on this blog and trying to come up with a semi-regular schedule, because I should be posting here more. Hope your projects are going well!