August 3, 2022

It’s day 3 of my AirBnb writing retreat, and I’m starting to feel the pinch of “I need to’s … ” for my business. I did as much as I could to remove tasks from my plate in preparation for this week, and at first it all felt good. I felt like things were cleared up and that I had plenty of time to worry about all of it next week.

And I do.

But I’m also more than two days in, and am starting to see emails piling up in my inbox, and I’m worried about all of the projects I *could* be working on and seeing progress with instead. This fear of standing still in my business creeping in, even though I’m *not*. I’m writing a book for goodness sake. A book that, in theory, is supposed to help grow my business. And yet the fears still creep in.

But I’m pushing through. Make no mistake, this isn’t easy. Not by any means. But it’s less that the writing is hard, and more that pushing myself through is the hard part right now. Forcing myself to keep going when I want to scroll social media. When I want to interact with others. When I want to leave this AirBnB. When I want to make some progress on business projects and tasks outside of the book so I can feel like I’ve earned this time, or that I’m successful, or whatever else my therapist would tell me I’m searching for.

I’m also still a bit stressed about word count. But last night when I was on the phone with Russell, and I was telling him that I had half of the chapters written, he made the comment that even if I didn’t write another single chapter over the next two days, that he would still think this retreat had been a success. That even just half of the book was a huge accomplishment. And I’m so grateful for him always keeping my head on straight. Because in the back of my mind, this retreat isn’t a success unless I get the entire rough draft done. And that rough draft is 50,000 words. And it’s really really good. And I know that’s not logical, and thank goodness he’s always there to remind me about realism because I need that grounding constantly.

But onto today …

Chapter one was fairly smooth. Thanks to being done at a decent time last night, and having some time to relax, I woke up motivated to get to writing. So I did. I skipped my entire morning routine, made a cup of coffee and immediately sat down to write. But I was not at all excited about the next chapter I was supposed to write, so I skipped it and wrote the one after that. And I knocked it out, hit my 3,000 word minimum goal for it, and was really motivated.

I took a break to make my breakfast, ate, answered some messages, and then decided to get back to work and write the chapter I’d skipped. And it. was. work. I felt so unfocused. Every time I wrote a paragraph I felt the urge to go do something else. The words weren’t flowing like they normally do. It was a mess.

I tried to put on some cozy music with my iPad, but then that just kept popping ads up every 15 minute or so, which did not help me get into the groove.

AND, as I was writing, I realized there were FOUR entire sections of a previous chapter that I hadn’t even thought to write, and now needed to be added in, and the entire chapter needed to be looked over for consistency revisions. Which, on one hand was really frustrating, because I thought that chapter was done for the week, and now I needed to go back in if I wanted to be finished with the entire rough draft by the end of the week.

On the other hand, it was also kind of nice, because that chapter was my smallest outside of the introduction chapter, and was only sitting at 2,400 words so I will be very glad to see the boost in that number after adding in four new sections.

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I ended up going back and forth between writing a little bit and not writing at all, and by the end of the day I had only finished two chapters, but had written most of a third, and half of a fourth. Which felt a little frustrating, but in the end I did end up writing 10,000 words.

I also ended up going home for the night. I wanted to see Russell and the cats, and just sleep in my own bed, so I did.

Love and cat-hair hugs,

Amanda

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