Writerly Growing Pains

A recurring theme of quite a few of my recent goal-check posts has been that things haven't been going as well as I would have liked. There are, I think, multiple reasons for that. One is that I'm trying to adjust to some new routines in my personal life, particularly since we now have one fewer person around the house on a regular basis who is able to help it with transportation and some other things that need to get accomplished. There are also some things I need to get caught up on even from earlier this year when a whole bunch of family issues occurred at once; things I was able to put off then need to be revisited now.

But there are other things, too. Things that are writing-related and that I need to be the one to work on fixing. One was putting more time into blogging than I felt I could afford; I've already made progress on that by decreasing the frequency of posting on the Write Every Day blog. I'm still struggling some with cycling back to revisions on previously-finished work. For the most part, my NaNoWriMo project from last year aside, this isn't something I'd had a major issue with before this summer. Part of this I attribute to trying to get a new handle on my own level of writing competency and what I consider to be a "good" story for me to have written. But even that feels like an excuse sometimes.

I'm going to keep moving forward and keep setting goals for myself. But for a few months, I might dial down their ambitiousness a bit, in the hopes of having a few "wins" to record. The meta-goal, then, would be to turn things back up toward the start of 2013.

I also need to make some hard choices about the "writing-ish" things I choose to take on. Most of those I don't really regret, but it's impossible to argue that they haven't taken up a lot of time. I need to make sure that when I'm committing my writing time to something that it's something I really want to be doing.

I suspect this is the sort of "growing pains" lots of writers go through over time, but it doesn't necessarily make it any more fun.