By Guess and By Goalie

No, that’s not a typo in the post title, I don’t mean “golly” I mean “goalie”. As in goal. As in setting of them.

It’s come to my attention that I’ve been paying a lot of lip service to setting goals lately. For every reason someone can give me to set them, I find two excuses why I can’t. In fact, I started this post yesterday with every intention of saving it for next Monday. You know, the old start something new at the beginning of a new week ploy.

Of course then I realized it for the sad excuse it was and decided to do something about it.

Now, all that being said and good intentions aside, I have a real problem with personal goals, both the setting of them and the keeping of them. Which is why I’m not so much setting goals as making myself accountable for my progress (or lack thereof).

So, you may have noticed that I’ve removed the progress bars on the right (not that they’ve been showing much progress lately) and replaced them with three new headings: New Words, Edited Words, and Other Writing.

Each morning, when I update my blog, I’ll update the previous day’s progress in these areas. For instance, the numbers that are up this morning are the numbers from yesterday. Admittedly they’re not great numbers, but I didn’t have this epiphany until after supper so as far as I’m concerned yesterday’s numbers aren’t bad. Every Monday I’ll post the totals from the previous week as an incentive to do better.

New Words is just that, new words I’ve written in a work in progress, or something new I’ve started. Edited Words are words that have been changed or added to a finished draft that has graduated to the editing stage. Other Writing . . . this one’s a little tougher. I think I’m including poems in here, as well as journaling and letter writing. Yes, letter writing. I wrote a 4400 word letter to my sister over the weekend and trust me, those words count! I am not, however, including the words I post on my blogs.

As an added incentive (as if posting daily word counts isn’t enough!) I signed up for the Page-A-Day Club over on AW. Although my poetry is going well, my fiction needs a boost. A page a day is a step in the right direction. A baby step maybe, but still a step. There’s also a Summer Challenge where the idea is to have a rough draft of something by the end of the summer. Sort of like Nano, but a longer time frame. We’ll see how the page a day goes before I commit to something more extensive.

Now, if you’re in need of a laugh, skip on over to my every day blog and read about what I learned in school yesterday. And just so you know, I've been using a computer since, well, let's just say it's been a very long time!