I failed at my specific measurable result. I spent the entirety of the week on one scene, which I rewrote at minimum, five times.
But as I’ve said, failing is fine as long as I learn something from it.
Something 1) I am a hoarder of secrets. I am convinced that letting out my story’s secrets in anything earlier than the last possible second is just horrible. I must keep my secrets. Keep them all!
In this scene, I was trying to explain five secrets at once, and so it was a jumbled mess.
I had to step back and figure out if I could reveal some of these secrets earlier (blasphemy!) so that they were already in place by the time I got to the bigger reveal. Now I will be aware of this issue, so I can better parse out secrets.
Something 2) This blog is a great tripwire. Sometimes I can rewrite a scene several times and something good will pop out of it. It has happened. That did not happen this week, and so I know now that it’s time to change tactics.
So I will be finishing this scene, even if I’m not happy with the final product, and moving on. I will have to get critique on it and see what works and what doesn’t.
Something 3) I am really learning to go easier on myself. I’m not making great progress on my story. I don’t know how my speed rates against other writers, as I don’t have any data to compare, but I feel like I am stumbling a lot.
And yet I am moving more quickly to the place of ‘this is me learning my process, step back and try something else’ over ‘omgiamnevergoingtogetanythingpublishedandi’mtrash’ and I’m proud of myself for that.
That being said, I’m giving myself the weekend off. I am going to a wedding on Thursday (in Florida mwhahaha!), and while I will probably write some on the 13 hour car ride, I am not going to expect tons of writing when I’m losing my weekend, which is when I get most of my writing done.
(btw, I’m setting this post up to post on Saturday, but I didn’t want to do all kinds of funky talking in the past tense stuff about when I’m leaving. I wrote this Wednesday night.)
So my specific measurable result is to finish my current folder. I’ll have to move my timeline around a bit, but such is life. The journey is more important than the destination.
