Thursday, October 1, 2009

End of September; October 2009 Goals

Well I’m sad to say that I didn’t meet my writing goal for the month of September. I did meet my agent and journal goals. But that writing goal, man . . . The frustrating thing is that it was an easy goal – just one hour a day. I will say, though, that I only fell short by one hour – it came down to one day. I spent the entire day Tuesday of this week planning lessons for my classes (and I mean it – the entire day! I had a lot to do!) and by the time I finished I was exhausted and couldn’t force my mind to do anything creative. And I REALLY needed to squeeze in some writing that day. Even though I almost made the goal, this is a blow because I had intentionally set a very low goal figuring there was no way I wouldn’t at least meet it, and I was sure I would in fact exceed it by a fair amount.

For once I would say it isn’t mostly a result of momentum or lack thereof. I got a pretty decent momentum going by the end of August and into early September, and though I feel my momentum beginning to wane now I know that the real reason I didn’t write as much as I would have liked is because I was stressed and overwhelmed. I was offered several jobs teaching adjunct over the past two months that I turned down because I was hoping I might get something better. The first batch because I was being considered for a full time teaching job, and then because I was being considered for a local teaching job. The “better” positions fell through in both cases, and by the time school started I only had one part time job teaching two classes a week at a school where I have to commute an hour and a half each way.

I don’t make quite enough money to feel comfortable – it is only part time – so I’ve got to find another part time job on top, which is stressful and depressing because I’m busy enough teaching these two classes and even if I wasn’t it’s frustrating to have an advanced degree and then have to just take what you can get for jobs – which in my case is going to mean working retail because my teaching schedule precludes office work. So I’ve been having a hard time of it the past month and I haven’t been writing as much as I should.

For next month I’m going to try the hour a day thing again. I still think this is a tiny goal, but I’m worried that if I set the goal too high I won’t even make an effort to reach it because I’ll feel like it’s just impossible. If I start working another job this month (which is very likely) I’ll be even busier, and probably sort of depressed as I adjust to my new non-graduate student life. I definitely miss grad school. It was so easy to find time to write and to center my life around writing. I know I’ll be able to find a way to work this out – after all, before grad school I wrote quite a lot and I remember feeling at first that as a grad student I hardly had any time to write – but for now I feel like I’m drowning in the real world. I’m starting to think again about PhD programs . . .

For October:

  1. Minimum of 31 hours spent writing
  2. Query 5 agents
  3. Submit to 10 journals