As week one of 2018 comes to a close I have already learned several lessons. As part of my goals I am working to be well rounded. I am working on paying off some bills for my financial goals, I have printed out my the manuscript next book I will be editing, and I have begun my running training. My personal ideas on how to move forward on my goals don't always line up with traditional methods.
Instead of writing one book, editing it, running through a few rounds of rewrites and a final edit, then publishing it, I have written half a dozen full length novels. They all now need to move on to the editing phase but I have to fight my desire to write other books instead because that would simply put me further behind in my publishing goals. Originally I had intended to get all of my current projects ready to be published while also finishing the first draft of three new novellas. If I were successful in doing all of this I would have a decent number of books I could have available for shows but it would also put tremendous stress on me and my time.
No one has ever made the statement that I am not ambitious. In fact my overly ambitious nature has been a topic of debate among my family and friends most of my life. I realized I may have been trying to take on too much by pushing to complete so many writing projects on such a short period of time. It is probable my work and quality would suffer if I tried to push that much. Today as I sat, combining my multiple lists of goals and ideas, I pared down to what I felt was a more achievable and focused group of goals.
The strange thing is, writing had nothing to do with my realization that I was taking on too much. It was physical training that proved to me I may be trying to take on too much. For the health and physical training side of my goals I am participating in a bike ride, half marathon, and three obstacle courses of varying lengths this year. I came up with the idea of running a collective fifteen miles each week to begin my cardio exercise. However since I only have a couple days off from the day jobs I had to push myself and do six miles one day and seven miles the following day. As someone who has never been a runner that was so much it nearly took me down for the count.
It got me thinking about doing things in a reasonable time or quantity. Running is difficult and understanding how forcing my body to do more than it was capable of doing in a healthy manner made me see how I may be trying to spread myself too thin in my writing as well. Now that I have re-evaluated what my abilities are I am hoping to begin starting to make progress crossing things off the to do list.
No comments:
Post a Comment