Happy May! Spring is in the air and it’s a great time to ask the all-important questions: What next?
The question provokes a change in mindset. It’s a perspective I’ve been adapting mostly due to my fancy, new, goal-oriented planner. My planner (which I love-buy one here!) has pages for reflection scattered throughout.
Two questions that inspire ‘What next?’ reflections
Are you continuing to progress, redirect, or facing unexpected challenges?
What were your most significant accomplishments in the last thirty days?
The bulk of what I wrote about for April centered around an activity called Camp NaNoWriMo. There is lots of great information about the event available here, but for our purposes it is suffice to say two things:
NaNoWriMo Accomplishments
1: In April, I completed forty thousand words of my new writing project.
2: In May, I will go back through the work and cull out (hopefully) four thousand that I will use as I move into creating the next stage of my work.
It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon, they say.
When I first started my sabbatical year of writing (see reminder post here), I came across the particularly terrifying piece of advice that writers should generally expect to create a body of work at least four times the size of the manuscript they will eventually send out to agents and publishing houses.
Spoiler alert: This is definitely, one hundred percent true. If anything, it’s rather conservative.
When I set out to consider the question of ‘What Next’ in June 2018, as I started my writing, I would have said that by April 2019 I would have contract with a publisher and be waiting on fall publication.
Dream the impossible dream, they say.
Because literally, this is impossible.
It takes an average of two years for a first time author to go from publishing contract to a book on the shelves. And thinking about how long it takes a first-time author to get to the publishing contract is a whole other depressing ordeal story.
So in a big picture way (and with the help of my amazing day planner, see note above), I feel like an important lesson I’ve learned this year is that in asking, “What Next?” it’s important to embrace the process. My furious (and sometimes very un-impressive) writing in April was a happy reminder of that.
A picture of (one of) the writing notebooks I will be tearing apart over the next month (or three) to celebrate.
Banner photo credit: Tyler Anderson