I don’t think failure is a bad thing. Not trying is bad. Dragging your feet, not putting forth your full and honest effort, defrauding your customers and lying to your friends and releasing substandard work, those are all bad. But failure? Naw. Failure is healthy. Failure means you were trying to do something impressive, and just happened to come up a little short. Failure is how you get stronger.

Time for me to set myself up for failure. It’s challenge time. I barely squeaked by last time, but this one is going to be even harder.

I have 58,000 words left to edit in my book, and I want to finish by the end of the month, 23 days from today. A few days after that I’ll see one of my editors, and it would delight me to no end to be able to hand him the draft in person. That’s my goal.

I like to think that if I was doing this full-time, I wouldn’t have to keep giving myself these challenges, but alas that other full-time job of mine always gets in the way. That’s why I’m leaning on you. Come the end of July, I want to be done, or to fail by as little as possible. Because here’s the thing – though I may not reach my goal, I think simply by attempting it, I will get me far closer to the finish line than I would have otherwise. After all, you can’t win a race if you don’t know where you’re going, right?

But I intend to win. This will be a major milestone, and bring me a giant step closer to one day getting this story of mine into your hands. Wish me luck, but most of all, keep me honest.