Gold Star Baby

I particularly did NOT do New Years Resolutions, aside from my One Word , but I did set some writing goals for myself this year. They are very simple:

FINISH YOUR FREAKING BOOK!!!!

So if you know me, you know what I love to write and have always wanted to be a writer. However, I have a major problem with never finishing anything I begin to write. So I have been working on a story for over 2 years now, and it is an idea that I have had (in various forms) for over 20 years now and basically, I just really want to finish it. The truth is most of what I have written on it has been done in the past two years of NanoWriMo writing. I wrote 25,000 words in 2014, and then in 2015 I won (whoooooo hooooo) and wrote 50,000 words. Right now the story sits at 95,000 words. So that means that only 20,000 words have been written TOTAL outside of the 2 Novembers. So...that is pretty lame.

So I almost considered making my word of this year WRITE or NOVEL. But it is not who I need to be, but something I want to do, so I resisted. But in many ways I want to make this a year of writing. I want to work on this story until I finally have an ending. I want to give it to some writing friends and let them suggest edits (this scares me as much as ANYTHING I have ever done or contemplated doing) and eventually I want to have a completed novel. Something people can read. Possibly something I attempt to send to publishers. I am not sure I have that much confidence in my ability but regardless...I want to write a book.

It has always been a dream and I have decided...now is the time. This is the year. I WILL write a book.

One of the ways I am trying to help myself do this is to implement a means of reward and/or a feeling of an assignment for every day. When I was doing NanoWriMo there was a suggested word count for every day, and the computer would tell you if you reached it or not. Keeping up with that gave me a reason to sit down and make myself work on it EVERY DAY. I am not so good at pushing myself to do that (obviously). My writing buddy Karissa (who is way more of a writer than me) sent me a blog once about writing and that author said she kept a calendar and every day she met her word count goal she gave herself a gold star. 

This is my new goal in life....to fill my calendar with gold stars!!!

I have a calendar that is dedicated to ONLY this and it took a lot of looking but I finally found some gold star stickers and I am ashamed to admit that it is January 8th before I finally got to use one, but today I earned my first GOLD STAR of the year.

This picture brings me so much joy! I cannot wait to fill it up!I will give myself a star if I write at least 1000 words or (once the story is done) I spend an hour or more working on my manuscript in whatever form it needs. Those are not huge goals. I am not a full time writer, nor do I want to set impossible goals for myself. 

But I will finish this book.

 I will be an author. 

It is a dream I will not give up on!