The Jogging Big Year: a cinch to write about because I’m on target. Most of my energy, however goes into the Writing Big Year, this book that fires me up but threatens to crush me. And that much grander daily preoccupation has not achieved what I’d hoped and planned.
I commenced 2016 committed to writing daily (lots) in order to finish drafting the book’s 20 chapters by year’s end. Over the past years, I’d often laid out such “plans” and then drowned, just drowned, and so it proved this year. On July 1, I revised the deal to two big years, drafting Chapters 1 to 8 this year, Chapters 9 to 20 next year. Well, on December 31 I’ll have in hand drafts of Chapters 1, 2, 5 and good chunks of 3 and 4. Statistically 2016 has been a 50% failure.
I wish it were otherwise. I wish I had no regrets. I wish I wrote this without a hammering heart.
But the Big Year notion has, in fact, driven huge changes in my writing approaches and methods. I’m doing better and, perhaps naively, have faith in my mind and my pen. On some mornings, a vision of the end flickers before me.