I took a bit of time off this past week. Not a vacation, exactly, just a break from the routine—no writing, minimal web, a lot of time out of the house. Given the amount of effort I’ve been putting into re-establishing my routine, I don’t know if it was a good idea, but at least this time, it was (sort of) planned. There were no major crises that needed managing. It was a break.

I think I needed that.

Before I took that time off, I loaded my PDA up with a nice, meaty collection of ebooks. I get twitchy if I don’t have something at hand to read, and the big bulky hardcovers I’ve been favouring recently don’t exactly fit in my purse. My PDA easily holds more than I can expect to read in a week, and it’s there for me whenever I’m bored.

Thing is, I’m not terribly picky when it comes to reading books in an electronic format. I’ll read pretty much anything I’m even vaguely interested in, or that’s been recommended by someone whose opinion I sort of trust. And I’m stubborn. If I don’t like a book, I might set it aside for a while, but I’ll probably keep pushing to the end in the hopes that it might improve. Which does happen, on rare occasions. (I’m only like this with ebooks. They don’t take up any physical space, and they don’t really cost much (if anything), so I don’t really feel like I’m losing much if I keep reading. Just time, and, sometimes, even a bad book is better than the alternative.)

The books I’ve been reading lately, though….

Not all of them have been terrible. Some of them, I’ve gone out and bought actual, physical copies of, I liked them so much. Some have been guilty pleasures. Some I haven’t cared for, but that’s just a matter of taste. They’re not poorly written, just not my thing. (I’m not naming names: the books I really enjoyed, or the ones I’m willing to admit to reading, were in the sidebar. The ones I’m not willing to admit to… weren’t.)

But I can’t imagine how some of them managed to get published. Clunky plots that don’t make any sense. Sentences that don’t make any sense. Awkward dialogue, and a weird need to explain everything that a character is thinking at a given time, and why.

The biggest problem I have with writing—with any creative endeavor, really—is holding myself accountable. NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy aside, I don’t have deadlines, except for the ones I impose on myself, and I find it really easy to let those ones slide. I mean… I don’t talk about specific projects much until they’re close to done. If I don’t get them finished in the time I’d hoped (or at all), no one really knows but me.

I write to-do lists, and keep track of my progress, but habit is actually my biggest motivator. When I’ve got a good routine going, writing every day for a month or so, it gets easier to ignore the little voice that tells me it doesn’t really matter if I don’t quite reach my goals for that week… I can make it up later. I’ll have the notebook or file opened before I even realize it, and once I’ve got a few hundred words on the page, I might as well keep going.

The problem with this approach is that when something happens to disrupt the routine, I find it incredibly difficult to pick it back up again.

Back in March, I reached the end of the notebook I was using to keep track of my writing progress. I didn’t think much of it—I still kept track of my daily word counts on a piece of paper, and kept forgetting to pick up a new book when I was in the store. It wasn’t a huge priority, anyway: I was still hitting about 2000 words a day. In April, Script Frenzy gave me a proper deadline to think about.

In May, I fell out of the daily-writing habit in a truly spectacular fashion, and I’ve been struggling to get it back ever since.

On the weekend, I picked up a new notebook, and I spent a few hours recording what little progress I’ve made in the past four months. It’s not quite the system I was using before, but, so far, I think I like it better. I set myself a deadline and target-wordcount for the story I’m currently working on.

And, to add a little bit of peer-pressure to the mix, I decided to put those goals on the front page of this site, along with a progress-bar, so you can see if I’m sticking to it. Feel free to nag me if the bar stalls for too long. (Though I’ll tell you upfront—I’m probably not going to be getting much work done the week of the 28th.)

I’m only a few days in, but it seems to be working so far. This is the first time in months that I’ve hit my weekly targets. I’ve written more in the past few days than I did in the entire month of June. I’ve almost reached a point where I don’t have to talk myself into writing every morning.

Maybe it’s a little early, but I think I may be getting things back under control.

Finally.