Day 38

23:00

Well, I haven't managed to get much blogging in today. I haven't managed to get much writing in, either. In fact, I just plain ol' suck.

I'm in a rut at the moment. It's partly because I've got a cold, and so I'm finding it difficult to concentrate. But I'm finding the daily writing - and this crusader project in particular - to feel more and more like a daily grind. I don't know why.

I'm going to have force myself to get back into gear. I'm too obsessed with finishing the project within the month, instead of just writing for a certain amount of time every day. I think this might be the problem I'm going to have: I've set myself three goals that each take up a different toll on my everyday life: to write for a good chunk of my waking hours, to produce a pretty large number of words every day, and to complete a large project a month. Always two of these seem to edge the other one out. On good days, it all seems easy. But on difficult days, it starts to feel impossible.

I should stop whinging. I'll start writing now and we'll just have to see what happens.

02:45

Just about made my word count. About half-way through this revisiting of the characters and plot. Feel less discouraged now for my effort.

It's made me realise, sometimes the end of a project isn't nearly as near as you'd like it to be. This is a very dangerous time in terms of how you feel about yourself. I think maybe the remedy is to concentrate on the process itself - that is, just writing. Writing every day. And making that time as enjoyable and productive as it can be, without making 'productive' in your head stand for 'completely unreal expectation of what you're going to achieve today'.

When I concentrate on these projects with a 'day to day' frame of mind, I feel happy about it. When I think of each project as so far from being completed, nothing I can do in one day feels like progress.

Maybe this is what I'm learning this month: how to be philosophical about the long term progress of what I'm doing, while exerting myself and seeing very little gain in the short term. And how to accept the frustration, the nagging sense of inachievement that is already such a familiar aspect to my life, in a new and more positive light.

It's certainly the hardest lesson so far.

word count: 2,332
hours writing: 4