I had such ambitious goals for this month–write close to 100K words and publish about 60K of it.  But I’m sitting here this morning and I’ve done nothing useful.  I’ve been fiddling with my sales tracking reports all morning.

The problems with a little bit of success–it pulls your focus away from what matters: writing.

It was interesting to look through the last three weeks’ of sales and look at what had sold each week, because it was different for each one.  I had a few promos that ran and that drove sales of different titles up.  And I had one story I wrote that’s had no promo yet that suddenly just started chugging along unexpectedly, which was very nice indeed.

(Most of what I have out is not under M.H. Lee…)

And, because I really hadn’t had a ton of sales before this, I stare in fascination at the little sales graphs that are no longer flat and think, “Wow.  How the hell did that happen? And when’s it going to end?”  And, worst of all, “Oh, well, gosh, that’s not as good as I’d like” when it’s better than any day of the prior four months.

Another reason you have to love the writing.  Because that thrill from getting sales?  It seems to die out very, very fast.  And what would’ve amazed you a month ago is suddenly meh.  And no matter how much you tell yourself that you should be happy about it, you aren’t.  You want to keep improving, keep moving up and up and up.

(At least if you’re me.)

I know what I need to do.  I need to write.  I still have 60K words targeted for this month.  They aren’t going to write themselves.

(And the fact that I now think 60K in the next two and half weeks is perfectly reasonable is a sign of how far my writing discipline has come in the last three months.)

I won’t manage that, though, if I let days like this one turn into a week.  Do that and I’ll slip back into old patterns and habits and that won’t get me where I want to go…

(Which is nowhere.  I want to keep working from home and hanging with my cute puppy.  Only one way to do that: WRITE MORE.  Oh, and get it out there in some way or the other so I can get paid for it. That helps, too.)

So, if you’re like me, quit reading this and go write that next story or that next chapter in your novel.  Go.  Shoo.