Making and Breaking Goals

Things have been hectic in my neck of the woods--or rather, they've been hectic keeping me away from my neck of the woods, which has made trying to complete my writing goals difficult (but maybe if I weren't so easily distracted that wouldn't be such a problem). After the Storymakers' conference I decided that on days I don't have other large commitments that I need to make a goal to write at least 3,000 words. That's less than two hours of writing if I plan what's coming next while I'm cooking, cleaning, or gathering eggs--that should be totally doable most days, even if I do have a five-hour commitment?

Of course, when you take out the days when I had to be out of town for work or book signings, Sundays, and the day I had a long patient transfer on the ambulance, it didn't leave a lot of extra days for writing.

On day 1 I managed 3,145 words.

Day 3 I squeezed out 1,450--I'm still not sure where the rest of the day went, but by the end I was just glad to have written *something*.

Day 5 I wrote 7,000! Woot! the only problem is it was on the wrong MS! Of course, I do need to work on Danny's story, but it wasn't the one I was SUPPOSED to be writing on (Though the new first chapter totally rocks, though, so my local monthly critique group will be excited to see it next week). *sigh*

Today I had intended to get some writing done (I don't count my numerous blogs), but there was animal housing to rearrange, cakes and bread to bake, a kitchen to clean up, and a zillion, trillion little things around the house that weren't done because I was out of town for a few days.

I have this beautiful goal of having a rough draft done on Grayson's book before the end of June. That should give me time to do a quick rewrite on it (or at least makes notes about rewrites) before I finish Shelly's book with my critique group and have to have a new project. Now if I could get Danny and Tia (and her irritating mother) to stop yapping at me and feeding me new scenes and situations I didn't realize existed in their story, I could focus on Grayson and the project he and Olivia are about to undertake, and the secrets they're both keeping.

It can get pretty noisy in my head when all of my characters start talking, but I'm going to use a firm hand on this one and make Danny and Tia wait for a while. Olivia has some big-sister meddling to do.