August Goals

60 hours a month has been working well for me, so I think I'm going to go for that again this month.

It's not gonna be easy, though.

Here's the breakdown:

This week, The Son is not in any camps. I can manage an hour a day.

Next week, The Son is at full-day camp. I'm planning to get a lot done here-- like, 30 hours in the 5 days of camp.

The week after that, we are on vacation. I am bringing the laptop because I need to check in with work every day, but realistically I will probably not be able to do more than "touch" the story every day. My family is not going to want to share me with the book while we're on vacation, and I can't really blame them for that. If I get 1-2 hours done the whole week, I'll be thrilled.

The week and a half after that is the prepping-for-the-return-to-school time. My mother-in-law will probably take him for a few outings in here, which will give me more time to write. But I'll probably wind up having to write in evenings and/or pulling a weekend marathon to make the goal.

Another wrinkle is that the Pitch Wars submissions open on Wednesday. My plan was to tweak my submission packet without counting that time as writing hours, on the theory that the 60 hours should count only toward the book I'm currently writing. I already worked on my query, and did not count that time toward July's hours. However, I need to edit chapter 1 tomorrow, and given how scarce my writing time is right now I think I'm going to go ahead and count the hour or two I spend as "hours written in August".