I am late posting today’s ROW80 update because, well, there isn’t much to update. After the early part of the week’s quick success getting Chapter 12 marked up, things slowed down. A lot. In revising Chapter 13, I ran into a bottleneck. One new scene needed to be added, but before I could write it, I needed to firm up the characters’ motivations for doing the (otherwise stupid) things they were doing. That took a while. I also forgot to take into account that yesterday was RWA chapter meeting day, and for me, that’s a good 6-7 hour chunk of time, including the drive to and from which is an hour each way.

I got about half of the new scene written yesterday, and finished it up today. I still need to write a new beginning to the following scene, needed due to the prior new scene, and the aforementioned character motivations.

So, less progress than I would have liked. I’m not making excuses, but here are the reasons:

• Failure to take other time commitments into account
• Failure to gauge the difficulty (and time requirements) of the task
• Time spent playing video games when the plot solutions weren’t forthcoming

The reason for all this? As I told one reader who didn’t want to wait until December for Time’s Fugitive: “Believe me, you don’t want to read this book now. It’s full of plot holes, confusion, and characters doing stupid things. I’m making it into a book you will want to read.” Hopefully!

For this week, I’d like to get revised through Chapter 15. I’m hesitant to commit to that, as both 14 and 15 are going to require a lot of work. But I’m through the block on 13, and think the rest of it won’t be too bad. So just that and 14 doesn’t seem like quite enough. Also, I don’t have a ton of other stuff going on this week, so… maybe!

Do you find yourself setting goals without taking other commitments and the difficult of the task into account? How does it work out for you?