The main purpose of this blog is to motivate me to finish editing my book, but I haven’t talked about that much. Mostly I’ve focused on inspirational or intellectually-stimulating posts, which help in their own way, but I think its time to get down to brass tacks. Its time to get specific on some goals, and use your attention and judgement to help me reach them.

There’s a major turning point in my story coming up. It’s one of the pivotal scenes of the book, and it’s also one of the ones I had the most fun writing. You see, even the best of scenes can be difficult to write, requiring a lot of wrestling and struggling and nail-biting effort to get them down on the page. This one, though, it just worked. I sat down early one day and wrote the entire thing in one sitting, and it’s some of the best writing I’ve ever done. It was also a very long sitting*.

I would like to edit this scene as quickly as possible, because I’m not as far along as I want to be and because it should be a lot of fun to revisit. So, I’m going to tell you my goal. Hopefully this will force me to reach it, for fear of having to slink back here and reveal to you all my disgraceful defeat.

Here it is: 27,000 words edited and/or rewritten by Sunday, June 9th. That feels a little slow to me, but once you include the days I’ll be covering for fellow writers at Random Curiosity, recording the next podcast, and the fact that I never write on Fridays – even I need a day to recharge –  the deadline starts to sound less ambitious. If it’s too easy, that’s okay – I’d love to reach it early, and then I’ll know for next time.

That’s what I’m going to go with for now. 27,000 words by June 9th. Keep me honest.

Mission, start!

* I may have gotten up to use the restroom or eat, but I don’t remember. I was too long ago. All the more reason to finish up.