February 1, 2007
It's not easy staying on track. This year, I constructed a detailed plan for my fiction writing, spelling out specific goals and caveats…laying out, for the first time, exactly what I want to accomplish and what I want to avoid. I thought I could stay on track and not fall back on old habits…but sure enough, midway through January, I was already slip-sliding away! Not even one month into 2007, and I'd broken almost all the commandments in my Big Plan! Apparently, focus…make that FOCUS…is even more of an issue for me than I thought it was. The good news is, as useless as my Big Plan might seem, it DID help me pull things together and get back on track. So maybe I'm a step ahead of 2006–otherwise known as The Year of Zero Achievement–after all. Instead of continuing to drift farther and farther off course until I hit an iceberg, the Big Plan enabled me to spot the drift and steer back closer to where I know I need to be. Instead of chasing a million little projects and obsessing about editors not getting back to me, I'm a hundred percent FOCUSED on selling my new novel and planning the next one. At least for the moment. Pretty sure I'll be way off course again before the end of February. It's my curse, I guess…but at least I seem to be fighting it instead of surrendering to the chaos like usual.
