Today, I’m supposed to immerse myself in writing for an hour and think about some questions that I need to address for writing. Before I do that, I want to mention that last time I tried this, I really wanted to stick with 30 straight days of writing and failed to do so. This time, I’m going to get through the Boot Camp, but I’m not going to beat myself up like I did last time if I don’t complete 30 days consecutively. Writing is important to me, and I’ve let my career get in the way of writing for myself. So, I’m going to make this work for me.
Setting Real-Life Goals
Rachel Federman has several questions that need to be addressed on this day after spending some time writing:
- Did this help you solidify your writing goals?
- Do you already know what they are?
- Do you want to make a career out of writing?
- What about your short-term goals?
- What do you hope to finish in the next few months?
- Are you writing just for fun?
I’ve realized that my goals are pretty much the same as they have been for the last few years, and they haven’t changed because I’ve allowed myself to remain frozen in place with fear of judgment and full of doubt in my abilities. I know that I want to be published some day. Wanting to write young adult literature has always been a goal of mine because I teach high school English. A new goal is to create a non-fiction piece on health and wellness, some kind of book for women to feel good about themselves. I’d also love to have a couple of successful blogs, one for teaching and one for health and wellness.
My Goal: to write for 30 minutes each day
I’d really like to devote more time than this, but I’m going to be realistic in my expectations. It’s the school year, and I also do personal training on the side. Saying that I’m going to write for an hour each day isn’t aways realistic when some days this week and next will go from 4:15 in the morning until 6:30 in the evening before I can even head home. This is not usually the case, but I would already be off track this week and next if I made writing for an hour my goal. For now, 30 minutes a day will work well, and if I’m able to write more, I will.
I’m also supposed to come up with a writing project. I will say that I haven’t figured that out yet. Two years ago, I had this idea for a YA book, but I’m just not feeling it right now. One idea I’ve been kicking around is to create a different YA book. My students are devouring this series called After, so I read the first one to see if I should include it in my classroom library, but I just can’t do it. The main characters in the book have an extremely toxic relationship, and I just can’t support that in my classroom. It’s actually strange. I have Koontz and King in my library (two kings of horror), but there is something about this series that just concerns me that my young, impressionable girls will hope that their relationship is just as passionate as the one in the series even though it’s dangerously toxic. At least with the other novels, the bad parts are done by evil people. This series blurs the lines too much for me. You really want to like the characters so it makes it too easy to forgive the young couple for their treatment of each other. To each his own, however. You’ll have to read it and decide for yourself. The reason I bring it up is because I thought of writing a YA novel that has a different effect, where the heroine doesn’t fall for the bad guy of the group.
Another possibility is writing a non-fiction self-help book. I’m thinking along the lines of Rachel Hollis or Jen Sincero. I wouldn’t expect to be as big as they are, but I feel that I could do something along those lines.
The third is just to write a cute love story. I have no idea what I would do or what my plot would be, but I think it would be fun and a little freeing to do something like this since I’ve been living in the land of non-fiction for a while.
The last option would be to expand my liveandthrive365 blog. I haven’t gotten it going yet. I bought the domain when I got back into personal training. I knew at one point I would like to get my personal training business going in some way, but I haven’t really been in a hurry since it is more of a side gig right now. It’s too hard to focus on starting a new business during the school year, but getting the blog up and running might be a lot of fun.
I’m sorry Rachel, I don’t have a project picked out just yet, but I’ll get there.
Overcoming My Ink Monster 