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 …

Not only did I start 2009 a lot later than others, I just can’t seem to get back into my fiction writing. I think being away from my computer over the holidays was something I quite enjoyed, so now that I’m back home I get my paid writing done – the “must” part of my writing life – and then get as far away from the keyboard as possible – often, I must admit, into the swimming pool.
Editing my Japan-based novel

Since an important goal of mine this year is to …

Of course, you know I have procrastination down to an art form – and what better way to prove it than to make my New Year’s Resolutions on January 13? Still, in our family we say that “13″ is a lucky number, so perhaps I’m doing it just right.
Anyhow, I’ve already hinted that 2009 will be a year of submissions and agent-hunting for me, as well as finishing another novel. I’m also revisiting some of my 2008 resolutions to guide what I plan for this year. So without, as they …

When you read this, it’ll officially be the last day of 2008 (yes, I’m posting ahead because I’m *going on holidays*, but I didn’t want to abandon my readers completely). Since I’m pretty sure that said holiday will mean I don’t achieve any more goals between now and the end of 2008 (a week away as I type), I think it’s safe to look back at my 2008 writing resolutions and see how I went.

Edit my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel and submit it

Check! I did edit it, and I submitted it …

I’m sorry, muse; I’m sorry, grand goals and dreams. Getting around to writing – even this blog post – seems so difficult at this time of year. Combine summer and Christmas (as we do here in Australia) and there are long daylight hours to spend socialising, catching up with people you may not see much during the rest of the year, spending far too long in the shops to do anything because half of the city’s population is there with you and trying to plan ahead for Christmas itself and …

A funny thing just happened to me.
I was procrastinating about getting a bit of work done – or I could fudge that and say I was taking a bit of a break after getting a stack of work done this morning (that’s true – I wrote my first 2,500 words for NaNoWriMo and also did a heap of blogging).
In any case, one click led to another and I was suddenly taking a 20-question quiz on procrastination. At the end they told me my score was 30/100 and that meant my …

While I’m still working on revising my first manuscript (more on that later – it’s going well!), I’m trying to get going with novel #2 as well. I was about to write “trying to get disciplined” about writing novel #2, but I remembered a recent Zen Habits post with the enticing (if sensationalist) title The Only Two Secrets to Motivating Yourself You’ll Ever Need. Leo made a very valid point that sticking to your goals is not a matter of discipline, but a matter of motivation: if you make your …

One of the podcasts I regularly listen to (see – I promised I’d be listening to more podcasts again soon) is actually produced by a huge chain book store that I actually don’t really like that much, but their podcast series is great. I guess I have to tell you what I’m talking about – it’s the Barnes & Noble Meet the Writers series and the interviewer, Steve Bertrand, just does such great interviews with various writers that I always enjoy listening to them. That, and they’re short – usually …

So … yesterday was the first deadline in our writing buddy system. Both my buddy Katrina and I had spectacularly disorganised weeks last week with the odd drama and hiccup thrown in for good measure, and failed to meet our deadline yesterday. Instead, we ate cheesecake together. (Baked cheesecake, the best kind).
However, we are not giving up, and decided that our deadlines are there to help us make progress and the deadlines are structured to give us a little room for movement – so we gave ourselves a small extension. …

So far, it’s really been one of those weeks. My paid writing gets done only because a deadline is looming; my poor fiction writing has only got a couple of looks in and only in the form of me opening up a Word file and leaving it open most of the day, hoping that seeing it down there on the bottom of the screen will inspire me to write.
But sometimes, you have those weeks where motivation for nearly everything is lacking. The Olympic Games are on – they’re a great …