A round up of January 2011 - The Journey So Far

Throughout January:

4315 words written on my Novella Shroud Of Death
3120 words written on Combined projects which include Blog Posts, poetry, and freewriting.
Total word count for January stands at 7435 and averages 239 words a day. overall January has been my most productive month for writing in the last 3 years.

Last April, I came back to writing after a long hiatus and I had pretty much turned my back on fiction deciding to concentrate on poetry. I enrolled on a degree level home study course with the OCA during the summer of last year and for various reasons I was late starting the course and finally handed my first assignment in in December.

In November, I took part in the November poem a day chapbook challenge hosted at Poetic Asides to get into the habit of writing poetry on a daily basis which also helped to delay my course. But no problem I could concentrate fully on my course in December. But somewhere towards the end of November when the creative gears had been reawakened I began to be pulled back to the idea for my first failed attempt at Nanowrimo which was Shroud Of Death.

Still trying to get into a regular study pattern my brain was proving tricky to coax into any form of habit and generally rebells against anything it believes to be a routine, I heard about the A Round Of Words In 80 Days challenge. It was Nanowrimo without the madness and in theory I could juggle studying with writing Shroud. It's taken me a month to learn to juggle the two and I'm behind on my course again. But I think February will be the month I find a happy balance between the two.

I'm getting older and have two years in which to indulge in courses before I seriously start planning my relocation out of London. It's time to leave the city and my life's finally heading down a path I'm happy with.

Index Of Januarys Blog posts

A Round Of Words In 80 Days

1/1/11 - Starting 2011 with A Round Of Words In 80 Days In which I set my initial goals.

3/1/11 Day 1 In which the challenge begins, and I resurrect Shroud Of Death and discuss how I undertake my initial planning.

4/1/11 - Day 2 In which I'm still on target.

5/1/11 - Check In 1 - In which I'm still on target

9/1/11 - Check In 2 - In which I fall behind perhaps the routine issue rears its ugly head and I start to realise how out of touch I've become from writing.

12/1/11 - Check in 3 - in which I change my goals for the first time and problems start occurring with my characters.

16/1/11 - Check In 4 - my first big stall but I get moving again. More problems with the characters this time.

19/1/11 - Check In 5 - in which I battle the internal editor and overthinking rules. Second halt in progress.

23/1/11 - Check In 6 - In which I beat myself up and revise my goals again and a second novella idea is born.

26/1/11 - Check In 7 - In which Shroud of Death daunts me and gets abandoned in favour of TCI and I realise I'm so far behind on my studies that I arrange time out of the office (which I'm wasting part of by writing this blog post) and I review my original goals for 2011 and get back on the horse.

30/1/11 - Check In 8 - Shroud Of Death rises like a phoenix from the ashes. I change my approach and my goals.