This is a question that comes up a lot in writing circles so I thought I’d answer it.

A lot of people say that the very thought of Covid stopped their writing in their tracks due to anxiety or whatever. They were afraid they might get sick, or afraid that their friends and family might die and that screwed with their jive. That never happened to me. My problem was something entirely different and entirely my own fault.I can still remember sitting at home, finishing up my daily writing on March 20, 2020. It was my oldest daughter’s birthday and I was getting the last of my work done before I headed off for the day. Then, my wife called about 8:30 and said she was coming home. The governor had shut down the entire state. All businesses were closed. We were in a lock-down.

I saved my work and made some calls and I was staying home too. It was the last day I’d write a word in a very long time, although I didn’t know it at the time.

I rarely ever write on weekends or holidays when my wife is home. I need peace and quiet and when she’s around, I have a lot of other things to do and I owe it to her to spend time together so my first thought was, I’d take a 2-week vacation because I couldn’t imagine this going on for longer than that, so I put my work away at about 2900 words, marked the day red as a missed goal and wrote down “Covid” in the margin and stopped.

Two weeks turned into three, which turned into a month and then two. I didn’t write a thing. I didn’t even think about it. Instead, I spent a lot of time getting things done around the house. We got Animal Crossing for the Switch and started playing daily. Life just went on as the new normal became not spending my mornings writing. I knew that I was falling behind. I had stopped mid-way through chapter 11 of the second book in a series and I realized I had no idea what I had been working on when I’d stopped. This couldn’t go on forever, could it? I had time.

Finally, about three months in, I said the hell with this. I couldn’t keep putting it off. I had no anxiety over the pandemic, I just couldn’t keep putting off my writing responsibilities. I sat down and over the course of two days, I read the first ten chapters I’d written and ran the first five through an editing pass. I needed to remind myself where I was. My outline helped but I needed to see the nuts and bolts of the story. Yet after I’d finished editing chapter 5, for some reason I simply do not remember, I stopped again. It was back to Animal Crossing and not writing. I’d added a few thousand words but otherwise, I had ground to a complete halt once again.

There I sat for another month before I finally decided enough was enough. I grabbed my chapters again, read through everything and finally edited up to the half-way point of chapter 11. Then, I started to write and I hit my stride again immediately. It was a new paradigm and I was dedicated not to stop. Every day, I’d get up early as I always had and get writing. My wife slept in, I wrote. From that very first day I returned, I never missed my writing goal and in fact, I started exceeding it consistently. I needed to catch up. My yearly goal of 6 books might be lost, but I would get as close as I could and here I was in July on only my second book. There was no time to lose.

I worked hard through the rest of the year and came close to my original goal. I finished five books that I’m counting in the 2020 column and that’s good enough, although I still regret stopping. I could have hit 7 if I hadn’t. Of course, no one will ever know if I hit my goals or not. That’s something only I see or know. It’s like keeping track of your daily word counts. No future reader is going to know, or care, if on April 4th, you missed hitting 5k words. It’s why you have to hold yourself accountable because there is no one else out there to do it for you. I’m not exactly beating myself up over taking 4 months off, I had no way of knowing that’s what would happen, but if I had, then the following Monday, I’d have been back in the trenches, pounding out words. You can’t let things get in your way. If you want to meet your goals, you have to hold yourself accountable. It’s ultimately all up to you.

This year, I’m not going to fail. I know what I’m going to do and no matter what obstacles pop up in my path, I’m going to power right through them. I’m writing more and stronger than I ever have before and now, unofficially at least, my daily word goal is 7k a day. That’s what I’ve been hitting consistently since I started the latest book. No one is holding me to it, it’s just what I’ve decided I’m going to do and at the moment, I’ve had no problem pushing to my goal each and every day. At this point, I’m days from finishing this book and moving on to the next.

That’s something you need to decide for yourself. Don’t be afraid to get back on that horse if you slip off. I fully admit it was my own mistake to allow myself to fail for so long. That’s on me. I could have, and in retrospect should have made another choice. I can only fix that going forward and so can you. So stop making excuses and get back to writing. If it’s something you’re dedicated to, then only you can make sure it happens.