I knew last week would be rough, since I was working early mornings and long days both Monday and Tuesday. I had intended Wednesday as a recovery day — since I know I need a chance to recover after something like that — but Wednesday ended up so full, between riding, barn chores, and haircuts, that I didn’t feel like it was much of a recovery day at all. So I ended up taking Thursday as a recovery day, and I legitimately didn’t get much done on Thursday (by design).
Despite the challenges of the week, it wasn’t a bad week for my goals.
Writing
Last week saw a lot of writing. I achieved my goal of a weekly blog post and Instagram post, of course, but I also wrote a piece for the doll museum’s newsletter, and I also worked on my novel four days out of the week’s seven. Currently I have a three-day streak that I’m planning on extending to four days tonight, and hopefully keep going throughout the week. Some of those days didn’t see a high word count, but over the weekend I had one day where I wrote nearly 2,000 words. I also came to a realization that — but more about that later.
Decluttering and Organization
Once again, the only “decluttering” projects I accomplished this past week were in the garden. We’re working on revamping the small flower bed, and I still need to finish cleaning up some of the detritus from years of disuse that are crammed into a corner of the patio. That being said, lately I’ve been itching to work on the doll room, so I don’t think it’ll be long before I transition to working on that.
Dolls
Sadly, another week has gone by without any work on the dolls. I do have that pop-up shop in four weeks, however, so I will need to get to work on them soon. I don’t think it’ll be this week, since I’ll be pretty busy again this week, but next week I will need to start working on dolls again.
Taxes
I got back to work on sorting emails for taxes catchup, which I’m pleased about. Hopefully I can keep that up.
Lessons Learned
On Saturday I started looking at the tentative writing, revising, and publishing schedule that I’d laid out months ago when I was making plans for when I want to self-publish. I realized that after the paralysis that has plagued me for most of this year, I’m getting dangerously off-schedule. I think I can still get back on track, but I’ll need to get my butt in gear if I’m going to still make the original schedule work.
With this in mind, I’m going to ramp up my writing expectations, even if that means backing off some of my other goals. To finish my current novel’s first draft, I will need to write about 2,000 words a day — which normally would be a little bit of a challenge but doable; it’s just lately that writing that much a day (or writing every day, period) has become near impossible.
Saturday I nearly achieved that 2,000 words, but Sunday and yesterday I fell way short. I will have to work hard at this if I want to get back on track and get this novel finished on time.
Unfortunately, this week is going to be a busy one: The friend I ride with is out of town, but her daughter leases from me one day a week too, so I’m taking her out to the barn to ride twice this week. We rode together today and plan to ride again on Friday. Combined with my day of puppy sitting tomorrow, that only leaves one day during the week to work on anything at home. And the weekend will be busy, too, so I’m not going to have a lot of time for my goals.
With that in mind, I’m going to prioritize writing above all else. If working on my novel is all I get done this week, that’s fine. But if I have the time, I also want to work in the garden a little, mostly because I have a torn-up flower bed that needs to get righted and two plants that need to go into the ground ASAP.
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