Friday, April 22, 2011

A Challenge Fail

I'm a bit blocked writing this post. How do you admit you've been failing at your own challenge? It's been three weeks since I finished my first successful week at my 6-AM Editing Challenge, and after that--well, I didn't have success.

Not to say that I stopped completely; I got up early a lot of mornings, and I did some writing. But no challenge writing. Nothing I could be accountable for.

There's tons of reasons why. Life happened; I needed some down time; I made a bad choice or two, more life happened. I lost momentum.

The first week was, essentially, my falling apart week, when the momentum went kaput. Week 2 was denial week: "I can still salvage this." Week 3 I realized I was just procrastinating, so I better get it out of my system and get set up to start again.

That's this upcoming week.

Remember the first post that started it all? I'm feeling that way again. Being on my challenge is one of the most gratifying things I've done in ages; I was about 50% less stressed the week where I did good. And I am getting back on this challenge if it kills me.

Because here's what I'm realizing: I'm going to do this, even if I fall flat on my face, even if I do so repeatedly. If that means doing one week of Challenge only to fail for three weeks, to get back up again, that's worth it to me. I really need to do this and I really want to do this, and for me, there's no time to waste.

The good news? Expect Challenge updates from me this week! The bad news is, you can also expect me to fail a few more times, because it's going to take some training to get this down.

Congrats to the people who I know got some of their writing goals accomplished recently. You rock! You inspire me! My book wants to be your book when it grows up!

And for those of you who, like me, had a definite challenge fail...It's okay. No guilt trips here.

Now let's get back on track.




Truly and always,
-Creative A

3 comments:

Ryan Sullivan said...

Hey, Creative. I've been trying to redeem myself with this last week of holidays and it's been working out surprisingly well. The past four days I have averaged 443 words to a total of 1771 words, which of course is fantastic for me when I usually would write less than 350 words.
I'm keeping myself accountable until school starts again, posting on my blog whether I won or failed. If I fail, I'll simply post, "No win today, I'll try to get back on track tomorrow" or something like that. Wouldn't want to be self-destructive.
When school does come back... [sigh]. I just hope beyond hope that I can work around it.

Aurora Smith said...

haha. "My book wants to be your book when it grows up."

You crack me up.

Chandler Craig said...

Despite my early triumphs, I also ended up failing. Life is trying to kill me, I tell you. But since my contracted book is due, oh, Tuesday, I guess life etc. is going to have to hold the phone.

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