Wednesday, August 31, 2011

My August media break...




Oh where, oh where, has Janice been? Oh where, oh where could she be?

Not in cyberworld. At least not for the month of August. Yes, I checked out of the internet for a month. No e-mail (now THAT was hard), no facebook, no blogs, no DISTRACTIONS. See, here was my dilemma. June and July had already went by and I wasn't where I wanted to be with my new novel.

My goal: to use my summer months (I'm a teacher, so I pretty much get June, July, and August as a vacation) to write a rough draft of this interesting idea I had. I vowed to myself not to revise one word. Just write a draft. I even used Laurie Halse Anderson's advice: I gave myself permission to write horrible.

I began to notice that life's distractions were really getting in the way of any substantial progress for the draft. I was checking my e-mail every ten minutes to see if my agent wrote me. I was checking facebook. I was reading blogs like crazy (because I love all of your blogs!). None of this is bad, per se, but it is if it detracts from a very important goal.

When school begins, I know (from past experience) that I am super busy. I teach, then I try to squeeze in workouts a couple times a week, then my son has piano lessons, and now he's in football, and you get my drift. Writing takes a back seat. Since I know this, I like to use summer to be as absolutely creative as possible.

So when I realized two months of summer had passed me by, I decided to get serious. That meant saying good-bye to media. I focused entirely on writing my rough draft with every minute of spare time I could devote to it. It was my hopes to complete the entire novel by the time school resumed.

You're probably all on the edge of your seat wondering if I did it....well, I'm pleased to say that August was successful in that I have over 200 pages of the novel drafted. I am not finished, but I have the last chapters outlined. With all that being said, I'm really proud that I cut off all the distractions for the month and focused on my writing.

But I'm not going to lie. I am SOOOOOOO happy to be back on the internet!

Maybe it's time for you to cut some distractions...you don't have to be as drastic as I was. But remember we'll never get published if we don't write the book! :)

Cheers,

Janice

2 comments:

  1. That's great you accomplished a lot. August was a busy month for me even without school starting--work, vacation, and getting my daughter to 2 swim practices a day. So I did not get writing done.

    But you're right, I get too distracted by the Internet.

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  2. 200 pages - congrats! You're right, the internet/blogging world is fun, but takes up a lot of time. I try to set limits - 15 minutes in the am, lunchtime, etc., but it's easy to get sucked in when there's interesting stuff to read and blogging friends to support. :)

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