No doubt some of you have been wondering how I went with my 15-day creation challenge and my goal of getting my novel ready for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The good news is: I did it!
Procrastination overcome by short-term goals
I really have to shout out a huge thank you to Zoe at Essential Prose for coming up with this 15-day challenge. The goal was to choose a project and work on it for an hour a day for 15 days. I’m actually pretty amazed at how well this worked.
Perhaps knowing that this intensive work would only last for 15 days helped me to keep doing it night after night – because I nearly always worked on my novel last thing at night, after all my paid work had got done – and having picked a project that I thought I could finish within the 15 days really helped. I think there were only one or two days that I didn’t do a full hour of work on my novel editing, but in each case I had done closer to two hours the day before so I didn’t feel too bad.
When the Amazon contest opened on Monday (Sunday night in the States, but that was 2pm on Monday here – right when I was in the middle of class and had to nervously wait a couple of hours and hope the first 10,000 entrants hadn’t already got their novels in) I was ready to go. And I was pretty pleased with myself, I have to say. Again, this is not a contest I expect to get anywhere in, but the motivation to complete my big edit in time to enter was perfect. (And given that entry was free, it’s been a great motivator all round).
What’s my next 15-day challenge?
Since this 15-day creation challenge worked out so well, I’m already thinking of what my next one will be. Since the rewrite I’ve just done goes a long way towards satisfying my second goal for 2009 I think I’ll concentrate on making progress towards the third goal instead, which is to get my second novel ready to submit in May. So my next 15-day challenge will be related to finishing the draft of that novel. I’ll have to take a closer look at how much I’ve done – and I seem to recall I have quite a lot of outlining done – and see if finishing the draft in 15 days is realistic, or a sub-goal of that instead. Stay tuned – and try the 15 day thing yourself if you feel like it will help! Let me know if it does. Or share your own anti-procrastination tricks, too.
Tags: 15 Day Creation Challenge, goal setting, novel rewrites
Amanda,
You made amazing progress! That’s so exciting… I can imagine how content you must feel.
Thanks Zoe, yes it is a good feeling
and thanks for providing the impetus. Thank goodness for other bloggers!
[...] I did my recent big edit of my first novel, I kept a list of ideas and thoughts of things I might like to change in the [...]
[...] what kind of magical event I’m waiting for, but since I had a great writing burst and got my novel revised and submitted, my fiction writing prowess has gone the way of, well, something that doesn’t exist [...]
[...] six weeks ago I proudly finished the edit and rewrite of my first novel draft and submitted it to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. They have quite a convoluted procedure for getting from (up to) 10,000 entries down to the final [...]