Goal Work

I'm pleased to report that I finished Chapter 10 on Friday! Hooray. On Saturday I pulled out all my notes on the next possible scene. I'm still wrestling with how to assign myself good, attainable goals, especially when things are as amorphous as they are now. One thing I've thought is that I will try to work for three hours every day on the book.

Another thought I've had is to break the book down into sections, like Flylady's zones, where you work on each room/chapter for a specified period of time (say a week) and when the time is up you move on, knowing you'll come back to it later. In the case of the house zones, they repeat every month. In the case of the book's chapters... well, coming back to them could be when I go through the next draft. Probably in a couple of months.

It sounds good on paper. I'm not sure I can do it, though. I'm pretty sure I could start out writing something and making myself stop at week's end. What I'm not sure of is whether I could keep going with it. When I've tried this in the past I've eventually run into a wall where no matter what I did I couldn't write. Or if I wrote it bored me to tears.

I see I shall have to work on this...

Oh, and I touched base with my editors at Bethany House on Friday and I have a new deadline: March 31, 2008 with a planned release in the Spring of '09. That's a whole year and a half away. Which is nice -- it gives me time to work, where I haven't had that in awhile!

Grace,
Karen