How much can I accomplish in one week? Progress report for August 9, 2019

1,591 words (as of 7:53am). Manuscript total: 75,419.

UPDATE: Added another 233 words later in the day before I got too tired to write… 75,652.

I added the time stamp there because I’m hoping to write more than once today. With a little luck, I will update this entry one or two more times before bed.

Now that finals are finished, I have one week before my student teaching duties begin. If grad school was crazy, grad school PLUS student teaching should be about twice as crazy. And on top of that, I have to film myself teach several times to fulfill the requirements of the edTPA — don’t ask me what all those letters stand for, “Teacher Performance Assessment,” I think. Basically, the edTPA means I will film myself teaching and then get graded on how I did — not by the university but by an independent board for the state of California — to see if I’m good enough to be worthy of a teaching certification.

In other words, the next four or five months will determine whether or not I can get started on what I hope will be a decades-long career of teaching.

But I have a week before that madness starts. One week to get as far as I can with my manuscript and all the other projects I’ve been putting off before all hell breaks loose.

So, back to the original question in this post: How much can I get done?

Here are four goals:

1. Add at least 10,000 words to my manuscript by August 15th
2. a) Fix the formatting for at least two of my novels so that the Amazon previews don’t continue to look ridiculous
   b) Fix the back matter and links of those two books at the same time
3. Speaking of back matter, find a new back matter partner for To Have Loved & Lost to replace A. E. Radley
4. Promote the audiobook version of Eastside / Westside / Love

Student teaching won’t stop me from writing!

I let graduate school derail my writing when I first started back in May. My writing stopped completely at first, and then once the summer started, I still wasn’t writing every day. What I’ve learned over the past week or two, writing every day even in the midst of finals, is that “not having time” is just not a valid excuse.

I think all of us know this on some level — “not having time” is not a valid excuse for not accomplishing our goals. We have to give our middle finger to Father Time; we have to tell him that we don’t care how much he wants to eat what we have — we are going to be scrappy and resilient and determined and we are going to fight for what’s ours.

I’m going to state it out loud for the sake of social accountability: Student teaching will not stop me from writing.