One more month of summer – excuse or opportunity to lock in your writing habits?
Summertime is always the best of what might be.
Charles Bowden
How’s your summer going, specifically in relation to your writing habits? Do you see summertime as an excuse to take a break from your writing? Or with life perhaps a little slower than usual, are you using summer as an opportunity to shore up your writing habits? Are you utilizing the summer months to lock them in, so when the busy-ness of fall and year’s end hits, your habits will be solid enough to carry you through?
Have you set in place the habits needed to reach your 2021 writing goals?
(Or are we having this conversation again next year?)
Summer can be a risky time for book projects. Your book writing could be chugging along, going well, with steady progress and no major delays – until summer hits. This is especially true this summer, when the world is emerging from a hibernation in a sense, with things to do, places to go, and people to see.
It can be easy to get so wrapped up in all the things, places, and people, with your calendar filling up faster than you’re aware of, until – oops – what happened to that book you were writing? The book that was going well, that you were enjoying writing, that you were proud of, that you were looking forward to finishing…
…maybe the finish line was even in sight.
Without a solid writing habit in place, you risk letting your book project slide off the rails and barely noticing it. You risk losing all that momentum you’d created. You risk letting the energetic connection between you and your book fizzle out. Then, when fall comes, and still with no writing habit in place, and all the end of year busy-ness ensues, by the end of the year you might no longer even have a book project.
This would be a terrible shame. Your book is something you were once quite excited about. You had goals and a “why” at the heart of your book that made it worth doing. Finishing your book was something you looked forward to. It was an exciting thing you were proud of that existed outside the boundaries of “regular life.”
How can you prevent your book from going into the drawer of unfinished projects?
It’s easier than you think. Rather than using summer as an excuse to push your book project to the side until “later,” what if you used this remaining month and a half (or so) as a reason – a mission – to double down on your writing habit?
What if you used this time to focus so hard on cementing your writing habit, that when “life” hits, it has no chance of hurting your book project?
See the people, go to the places, do all the things. But make sure, in the midst of all the things, you continue scheduling your writing caves, you continue practicing your writing habits, you continue doing the things that have brought your book this far. You continue shoring up your habits. You aim to make them bulletproof.
Because your book is worth it, and you, as its author, are DEFINITELY worth it!
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