Milwordy: Week 34 Thoughts

Stats

Week 34 Average Daily Wordcount: 3,739

Week 34 Total Wordcount: 26,178

April Total Wordcount: 71,190

Year Total Wordcount: 682,714

Words to go:

April: 12,144

Year: 317,286

This blog was supposed to go up on Tuesday but I never got the chance, so the stats are a bit out of date, but they were only meant to reflect week 34 anyway. I’ll be posting my April wrap-up later this week.

April has been a rough one. In spite of the fact that I’m roughly on track for my monthly word goal of 83,334, I only actually hit my daily word goal 10 days so far this month. Those 10 days were BIG word count days and very taxing.

That’s not the way I want to do this challenge. I don’t want to spend three days barely knocking out a few hundred words only to save myself with a 10k word day on the fourth. That’s not sustainable. And it’s not how I do my best work. This challenge was supposed to be about making myself a better writer. If I’m not doing that, then what’s the point?

Last week scribblerstad suggested taking a break for a few days and not thinking about Milwordy at all. I thought it was a good idea, so that’s just what I did. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of last week I didn’t write at all. I didn’t even think about writing. When little errant thoughts about writing tried to sneak their way into my consciousness, I shooed them away.

It was surprisingly difficult. But also refreshing. I did come back to writing feeling better and less burned out. I still feel a little like I’m limping across the April finish line, but I’m not quite so scattered and frantic, so I definitely have to thank scribblerstad for excellent advice!

As for what comes next, I’m gearing up for May. I’m trying to find a little of that New Year’s motivation that helped me out so much in January. I’m two-thirds of the way through this challenge now and I think I can make it if I can just find that little extra oomph!

I’m going to try very hard to schedule two days off each week. That’s worked in the past, and this most recent break was a good reminder that rest is important. Moreover, something that I learned this last week that I don’t think I realized before is that breaks should be true breaks. I tend, even when not working on this challenge, to be thinking about this challenge. I need to give my brain time to rest. So, even though it’s hard, on my days off I need to not think about Milwordy. I need to let myself breathe.

And on a bright note, giving myself that rest allowed me to get some reading done, which was awesome. It’s easy to forget sometimes that my love of writing was born from my love of reading. Getting to dive into someone else’s story sparked a little bit of inspiration for my own writing, but more importantly, it just felt good. I’ll have to remember going forward that it’s just as important to take in other people’s stories as it is to create my own.

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