Monday, December 31, 2007

My One Word for 2008

At the end of last year, our pastor encouraged us to select one word (www.myoneword.org) that would be our motivation for godly living this year. I picked “surrender” for 2007. There were several things in life I gave up as a result of this. One being writing. I felt God’s call to do that. However, he has given me this thing back for some reason. Despite its serious toll on my mind and emotions, for some reason, God has not taken away the desire to craft a novel. He has only deepened it.

And so, wanting to complete a rough draft of about 75,000 words before I turn 40 on September 14th, I’m going to need a lot of my “one word.” It is “perseverance.” The driving force behind this word is the scripture found in James 1:4—“Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

In my case, perseverance is needed to finish my work in progress. I know my tendency to get excited about something, obsess about it, and then let it fall by the wayside later. If I’m to achieve my goal, I need to stick to the plan and write about 307 words a day. Thank God it’s a leap year—I get an extra day. Woohoo!

So I guess I’m going to keep track of my progress here on my blog. That should help me stay on track and accountable to some degree. And I’ll enlist the help of some writing friends, of course. Writers need each other, no doubt.

So, sock it to me, 2008. I’m ready for you.

2 comments:

  1. Okay. I just said a prayer for you, and I'm in the same spot. Write those words, gal! It's amazing what God can and will do with them once they are written.

    And if you fail to get your word count out, don't sweat it, just write again tomorrow . . . but don't let tomorrow be four weeks away.

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  2. Anonymous9:58 PM

    kc, I wish you well with your writing. It can be a hard way to go but so can anything worth doing. I can relate to the feeling of surrendering to God, being prepared to give up writing if it was not a God given thing, and found that the desire to craft stories is still there. If you feel like another read, can I suggest "Outcasts of Skagaray", by Andrew Clarke.

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