It's halfway through my 30-day experiment. Thought it warranted a check-in, even though I breezed past the 100-day milestone on my 365-day experiment without comment. P'raps I'll double up.
30-Day 'Commitments' Experiment
Have learned a lot in the first 15 days of Do It Right December. I've kept my commitment of writing new material every day and have maintained the chapter-a-day intensity this week with the exception of yesterday. But that was because on Friday I did a chapter and a half, plus wrote a short piece for submission, making it a 12-hour-straight writing day. Very productive, but also very stupid. This is the equivalent of sprinting out of the gates for a marathon and then expecting to finish strong. Saturday, I was so burnt I couldn't think straight. Sunday I felt better, but was grumpy and fearful about falling behind. Lesson learned.
My commitment to the practices that work: morning pages, gratitude, meditation tapes, etc. has been fairly good. Morning pages are rock solid and are extremely helpful in focusing my thoughts and energy on the chapter at hand. The other woo woo stuff has been up and down and I appear to have lost that Drink The Kool-Aid positivity I had at the beginning of the month. A brutal full moon and run-in with PMS might have impacted it, but I'm going to have to press reset on that one and c'mon get happy once again.
Health-wise, I've relaxed the raw food focus and am back down to about 50-70% raw. I'm not sure what this is about, but I'm not uncomfortable with it. I'm still eating well, just not hard-core. I've also had trouble getting to the gym every day, which I've noticed is the first thing to go when I get really focused on my writing. Boyfriend has been swimming early mornings three days per week, and I've started to join him. Swimming leaves me feeling better than any other workout, so I'm going to continue with it. Even though it means getting up at 5:30 am.
Year-Long Experiment
As far as An Artist for One Year (a.k.a. Just One Year a.k.a. JOY), I truly feel like I've transformed. I don't know if it was the homeopathic remedy that did it. Or if it was the simple act of writing every day. Or if it was some kind of three-month gestation period, but I've passed through some sort of portal. I feel like I fought myself for the first 90 days and then, rather suddenly, stopped. This reminds me of training for Ironman when I did the same thing. I self-sabotaged for three or four months, then I quit the tantrums and got down to business.
It helps that my draft is almost complete, I'm sure. I'm a little nervous that every book I write will be this agonizing, but mostly I'm just trying to stay focused on finishing this one.
Everything in my year-long plan has taken longer than I expected. I was convinced I'd have this book cracked off in a couple months max and I'm now looking at five months for a first draft. This is probably far more realistic and measuring myself against arbitrary timelines is, I've learned, a demoralizing thing to do. It takes however long it takes. It's a humbling lesson, but one I needed to learn.
But there is a balance between something taking longer than you thought and you not working hard enough on it. I tend towards fear-based paralysis and apathy sometimes, which I frequently interpret as laziness. This 30-day experiment has taught me how important it is to do the groundwork to clear away the fear FIRST and then gently press through any junk that comes up while I'm working. During Ironman, I used to say that my training started the day before with what I ate and drank and how much sleep I got. I have a similar feeling with this: I need to prepare for the work (morning pages, meditation, sleep) in order for the work to be good.
As I expected, the actual nuts and bolts of my year-long plan have revealed themselves to me gradually. While they are similar to the play-by-play I laid out in August, my plan is now to complete this draft by the end of the month, then let it sit while I focus on other things. I suspect I'll be fatigued and will need to fill the creative well. How I do that is yet to be determined. I'll be revising draft #2 of the book while in Paris next spring, assuming the plans and money all come together for that.
And my next writing project will be a collection of short funny pieces, based on the style and voice I've developed thanks to this blog. My hope is that working on short pieces will be less emotionally ravaging than the book and I can work on getting them published as I finish them, which will hopefully create a feeling of career momentum, which I'm not feeling right now.
I may not be feeling the momentum, but I am feeling the progress. I've learned a ton about myself and my process. And I'm no longer afraid to be a writer. I'm looking forward to the submission process for this book and the short pieces, and while it's still early days, I don't fear rejection. I see it as a part of the process and a way to gather more information about myself and the publications I'm targeting. For someone who let the possibility of rejection stop her from writing a word for ten years, this is frickin' huge. Onward.
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