More Complete Success!

So Sarah just finished taking the Bar (!!) and I finished the draft of the novel.

I'm not adding more exclamation points onto my accomplishment because, in all likelihood, that's not the last time that I'll be making changes to the book. But it still feels good to have taken the piece to a place where I'd feel comfortable leaving it and moving onto the next thing.

Which makes me wonder what the next thing is.

Suggestions?

Also:

Partial Success!

So, paying myself in fake money only slightly worked. What's turning out to be impressively effective is to hold my Internet hostage every morning.

I turn off my wifi, work for an hour, and then I can waste as much time as I want. Which, after the initial rush, isn't as much as it might be.

Learning from my past failures, I also set up some consequences. I told Sarah that if I used the Internet before my hour of work was up, I'd give her $100 to spend on something that I hated. (I don't know what we'd do with 112 cans of baby corn, but I'd just as soon never find out.)

Fear of tiny vegetables was more than enough to motivate me to complete my hour of work in record time (one hour).

Drunk on my success, I pledge to work 1.25 hours tomorrow, a substantial increase over the previous day's workload.

Tiny Tim Gets a Job

If you ever wanted to know how Tiny Tim would fare in the modern world, I've got a game review you should read...

http://outofthestormnews.com/2011/07/11/money-metropolis-a-capitalist-dystopia/

One Week Down

I would call this first week a mixed success. Some wrenches were thrown into various gears when Sarah and I jetted off to Atlanta for our good friend Anna's wedding. As a result less writing was done than would be optimal. On the plus side, I ate a lot of delicious grits, got to hang out with friends, and had an awesome time at the wedding. I'm going to count it as a win.

My new strategy for time management is to give myself an hourly wage that I would pay myself if I had the money. Writing a novel is basically investing in myself in the hopes that it'll pay off, so I'm just trying to track my future accumulation of wealth.

It's much more fun to work with big numbers than small numbers, so I'm going to say I'm worth $1 million dollars a year. If I worked 40 hours a week, that'd be $500 an hour. My goal for this week is to net $5,000 with $500 an hour as my hourly wage. To make it tougher, I'll keep track of non-productive browsing also. Let's say that costs me $500 an hour. So I'll have to have 10 more hours of productive work than non-productive work by Sunday. I think I can do that.

29 Days Earlier

Dear Blog world,

How's it going? You guys look great. Really. New browser? It shows.

So, I haven't written too much this year. Or rather, I have, but very little of it has been on this site.

Some has been at Out of the Storm News. Some of it has been for Pheon, a Facebook game. Some of it has been for Precipitate and guest blogs.

And of course, most of it has been on my humble novel about the end of all time.

But I like this blog. And I like how I feel when I write it. You, Internet, you don't judge me. Or if you do, you don't tell me about. Or if you do, your comments get flagged as spam and I don't read them. So I thank you for that.

The summer is halfway gone, and I need to set some goals. Moreover, I need to put the goals out in the world so that someone can hold me accountable, even if it's just the thought of other people (and commenting Spam Bots) that I'm accountable to.

Actually, it's a short list this time.

Goals:

1. Finish the novel.

End of goals.

There might be some faulty logic spending any time writing on the computer (like right now) and not have it be about the novel, but these 30 minutes of blogging will pay me back in the end. I've seen from my friend Colleen's blog that public goals can be a good motivator.

Basically, I figure I have a month to go. Sarah takes the Bar at the end of July, and it'd be great to have nothing hanging over my head when we go on a post-Bar celebration trip. It's an arbitrary stopping date, but arbitrary's better than no-bitrary. I'll take any finish line I can get.

So I pledge that I will finish this novel in a month. I'm not saying it'll be perfect. But it'll be ready to send off to agents by 4:00 pm.

I'll give you updates at least once a week to update you on my (very impressive) progress.

A side goal, which seems tougher than it is, is to spend more time working on the novel per day than on wasting it on the Internet.

I hope blogging doesn't count.