I got to Sunday, and June 1st with a sigh of relief. I had set myself some fairly aggressive writing goals for May after a reset at the end of April, and didn’t make any of them.

I realized this was happening about ten days ago when the short story I’d been working never quite reached the end. Partly that was because I was practicing a specific craft technique, but mostly because after a fairly solid start at the beginning of the month, the writing just didn’t happen.

Once I sat down and thought about it, the reason was pretty clear. A project I was helping out with for my day job, became mine full-time so I was in total catch up and understand mode as well as herding the cats on my original projects. My usual writing time is later in the evening when the house is quiet, except by that time my brain was a mushy mess and the last thing I wanted to think about was writing fiction.

I wasn’t happy about that, so I sat down again revisited some classes and thought more about what my day looked like, and because of timezones and client schedules, I realized I had a block of time very early in the morning, anda class recommendation was to set yourself a minimum, say 250 words.

Given I haven’t been writing anything close to that on a daily basis, and it was making me cranky, I decided to give it a go – 250 words before I even look at the work computer.

Today is day eight. Not the longest of streaks but I’ve also found that I do have energy to revisit the manuscript later at night. Mostly it’s only been a hundred words or so but there have been times where another two or three hundred words have popped up.

I’m not predicting how long this streak will run but eight days is my longest consecutive writing streak so far this year. We’ll see how I’m doing next Monday.