Monthly vs daily

When I started off this blog, I chose to give myself a daily goal. I wanted to have something with which I could hold myself accountable - a palpable goal that I could easily either succeed at or fail. I wanted to know that if I had missed a day, it wasn't something I could just make up down the line. If that were the case, I would have been significantly less consistent with my blogposts, and probably ended up scrapping the idea entirely before getting even a month out of the gate. I mean, I didn't entirely expect to last as long as I have regardless, but that's just kind of a sign that I went with the right choice.

Five hundred words was kind of just an arbitrary goal, and something that I thought I could pull off daily without much concern. I could have easily done the same with a monthly goal - with an average of thirty days a month, that would be fifteen thousand words per month, give or take five hundred. Really, that's not a bad goal. I mean, it is what I end up doing anyway.

But putting it that way, in monthly increments rather than daily, gives more wiggle room. I can feel like I can take some days off if I do particularly large writings on other days, or because I know I can just write a thousand words the next day to make up for it. It allows for the opportunity to make up for failures the way a daily goal simply can't. If I miss a day the way I have it set up now, as I have done on a few occasions, that's it. My goal of writing for a year straight has to start over from there.

And that's precisely what I want out of this. I don't want wiggle room. I don't want to say, "Well, I messed up here, but I can just make up for it over here." In my experience, doing that just piles up on itself until you reach a point where you really can't make up for it anymore.

I bring this all up now because of my participation in Nano. Nano does have a monthly goal, and one that I have been falling behind on nearly all month. It's taken a great deal of effort to simply attempt to catch up, which I have yet to do, but I have started to inch back in on it. But I'm running out of time, and the next few days for me are going to be challenging.

Nearly this entire month, I have spent every day questioning whether or not I will succeed. I have tried and pushed, but some days I just can't get that much out of my story.

But thanks to the practice I have had over the last year, there has been one thing that I have managed to do with it. I have written at least a small bit of my novel every day without fail. Some days it has been next to nothing, but I wrote for it all the same. And of all the years that I have done a Nano novel, this is the first year that I have succeeded in doing that.

Which is progress. And progress feels good.