From Jo Leigh:

Here’s to you ‘you valiant few,’ who have battled the holidays, the overindulgences of parties, houseguests, children home from school, nasty weather, and all the normal, everyday stuff that makes not writing seem like the wisest course. You’ve taken major steps to becoming, to being, professional writers and now it’s time to acknowledge who you are and what you’ve accomplished.

Even if you didn’t reach your stated goal, even if you just wrote once when it would have been easier to skip it, give yourself a hand.

This is a tough business. I’m not talking about the agent-getting or the selling of the book. I mean the discipline and persistence that is perhaps the most important part of the job.

There is no possibility that you, as a professional writer, will not face difficult times. To paraphrase: There Will Be All Manner of Crap. Sickness, emergencies, computer meltdowns, editorial changes…the list goes on and on. Those with discipline and persistence will triumph. Those without will get other jobs. It’s as simple, and as amazingly difficult as that.

So pat yourself on the back, have a cookie or a drink or watch a beloved movie, then get back to it. This is the job. And the rewards are awesome.

From Lauren Dane:

Congratulations to you all for making it to the end! You took up the challenge and whether you got 100K words or 10K - you wrote. You worked and got blocked, you succeeded and failed but you kept at it. And guess what? That’s being a writer.

From Portia Da Costa:

I’d just like to send out a big, congratulatory hug to everyone who took part in the Sweat with Sven Challenge.

Some of us will have written many, many thousands of words. Some of us maybe only a few thousand or less. Some of us will have met and exceeded our goals with flying colours. Others, like me, may have fallen short of our goal amounts, to a greater or lesser degree.

But what’s important is that we all took part and we were all in it together… and we’re all going to continue to write regularly in our own personal challenges in the days to come.

Happy Writing, guys!

From Shiloh Walker:

So Sven’s over and done. “Did you finish” isn’t the big question. The big questions is… “Are you writing more?”

The key to being a writer is to write. Not one a week or when the spirit moves you, because if you plan on having more than a book or two out on the shelves, you have to write whether you want to or not. There will be issues outside of writing you can’t control~ there will be edits, there will family issues, there will be times when you’re sick, there will be holidays…but there will also be deadlines and deadlines aren’t met by writing as a hobby.

So whether you finished your book or not, if Sven got you in the habit of writing on a regular basis, then you succeeded.

From Jaci Burton:

It’s the end, and whether you wrote 100,000 words or just 1,000, pat yourself on the back. You participated and you succeeded. There is no failure if you try. The holidays are a tough time for anyone to write, but you had the guts to sign up and want to do it. So many writers never even make the attempt, for fear of failing, or make up a litany of excuses for why they can’t. You were one who thought you could. Congratulations! I hope you enjoyed it and it wasn’t too painful for you. I always find joining a group like this to be helpful in my writing. Writing is such a solitary endeavor. It’s always nice to know there are others like me out there struggling to make it work every single day. I hope that whatever successes you had, that you continue to push forward every day. Don’t ever quit!

From Larissa Ione:

Well, you made it! And even if you didn’t reach all of your goals, give yourself a break. There’s a reason so many authors refuse to schedule deadlines during the holidays! Keep writing, and keep challenging yourself. Sven’s a great task-master, but ultimately, you’re your best motivator. We’ll see you next time!

From HelenKay Dimon:

This one was tough. Between the holidays, the family get-togethers, trips, illnesses and everything else going on, getting the words down on paper in some coherent form was not easy. But you did it. Maybe you did not write as much as you wanted. Who cares? You wrote. During one of the most frenetic times of the year, you hung in there and kept typing. That’s commitment. It’s also a reminder that the work is important. With everything else that happens - family, friends, work, whatever - you need to make time for your dreams. Your work. Your writing. Never forget that. Whether you wrote five chapters or 500 pages, you kept going. Congratulations! Your only job now is to continue. Let this be a spark to continue, to finish and then to start something new. And, until next time…keep writing!

From Sven:

Don’t think I won’t be back.

Check back around the first of February. We hope to know more about Round #3 by then, and don’t forget the sidebar poll asking if you’re in for another round! Congratulations to you all!

“There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

Two days to go. How close are you?

I’m not a big believer in the “this one wrote itself” philosophy. Sure, some books are easier to write than others. Some characters crystallize in your head better than others. Some plots flow while others bumble around. Some pages go from mind to keyboard with a great deal less profanity and hair-pulling than others. But the reality is the words don’t get on the page without a writer putting them there. The computer doesn’t write books. We do.

Despite that, there are these moments. The ones where the writing is hard, the words won’t come, it all reads like crap when you try to revise it…and then it happens. You read over something you wrote days or weeks of even months ago and you don’t remember writing the words. Ever have that happen? You go along and say, “wait, when did I write that?” and then realize what you came up with is pretty good. Whether you’re a plotter or pantser, you stumble across those lines. Even when you felt as if you were fighting every word, starting every sentence with “she” and only using “to be” verbs, you managed to come up with something great. Something that fit and came from you without having to dissect every syllable. That’s the It moment. You were in the zone and did not even realize it. And we all experience those speical times. We do. You probably don’t realize it now that they’re out there. It’s hard to see that when teh deadline is looming. In fact, you might not realize it until you look at copyedits or review a manuscript for the 50th time that you had an It moment or two. But, they are there and you need to hang on to the feeling you get when you find them.

So, as you worry and convince yourself you can’t write - and we all do that - take a step back. Go to the beginning, read through and you’ll see. Just where you thought the thread fell apart, it might actually have come together.

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.”

You’re on the last leg of the challenge. You’re feeling the pressure. You’re doing your best to cram as many words as you can into your project so you don’t feel like a complete loser, right?

And this post is encouraging…how?

Well, let me assure you that you aren’t alone.

Writing over the holidays can be hugely depressing. So much is going on…parties, shopping, cooking, cleaning the house for guest visits…it totally eats into your writing time. Not only that, but holiday stress and winter bugs take a toll on your health. So even with the extra time built into this holiday-timed challenge, your word count could have suffered.

Trust me. You are not alone.

I came to a grinding halt on my Sven project a few weeks ago, so I bounced from working on other projects to working on out-of-order scenes in the Sven project. Then the holidays flitted into my life like snowflakes floating an elf’s sneeze (OMG, do you see how much the holidays messed with my writing?) and all was lost.

So yes, I’m cramming. Writing like the wind (elf’s sneeze.) I didn’t always make my daily or weekly goals, and I may not make my Sven goal, but you know what? In the long run I’m not going to remember that I wrote 950 words instead of 1,000 on December 24th. I’m going to remember what it felt like to sit in front of the Christmas tree and play a board game with my husband and son. I’m going to remember the look on my son’s face when he opened his Christmas Eve present. I’m going to remember how we finally got the stray neighborhood cat to come in out of the cold and eat a warm meal.

So you didn’t make your holiday goal. So you didn’t make your Sven goal. You made an effort. And you still have time. Make a push this week, but don’t beat yourself up for what you didn’t do.

And remember, you are not alone.

Our last Wednesday check-in. How close are you to the end?

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads. ~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958

Use it.

Words?