Tempus Fugit

Dean Wesley Smith calls the summer the time of great forgetting, when writers tend to put their writing to the side and lose focus on their goals. This can be followed by the time of panic, as writers realize that their yearly goals have become unrealistic by the time they remember to write again, or the time of reassessment, depending on the temperament of the writer.

My goal is not set on to the calendar year, but it does have an arbitrary six month limit. I have not been considering how to measure my progress other than through keeping track of how many rejections I have collected. Given that I do want to keep my focus on writing, now seems like the ideal time to make those calculations.

100 rejections by the time a year has passed, from the moment I declared my intentions (February 26, 2014). It isn't the most difficult of goals. I don't even have to write 100 stories, since once a story is rejected I can always try it with another market. But I do want to keep writing new ones. It's good practice, and I already know I can write stories that are rejectable.

Now, I thought, until just a moment ago, that I had made set myself the goal for a year. But, it turns out I wrote six months.

In February. . .

Which means I have a little over a month to collect 72 more rejections if I want to meet my goal. . .

Panic or reassess?

I'll take the third option. It's time to go full speed ahead and get as close to my goal as possible in the time I allowed myself. August 26th will be the time to reassess, and evaluate what I did or didn't do. I'm not going to give in to the temptation to panic early because it looks like I'm going to fail at my goal. Failing isn't going to hurt anything.

But that doesn't mean that I won't try.