Motivation

I did a stupid thing.  Yeah, I know...you're shocked by this.

I signed up for BBC's WoCoMoMo contest.  Let me translate that for you.  BBC is Big Black Cat.  That's her handle on Twitter and on Agent Query Connect's website.  She announced on Twitter right before the beginning of July that she was having a blog contest to see if we could keep up with her word count.  WoCoMoMo stands for Word Count Motivational Month.  So she's encouraging us to just write.  It has to be fiction and our blogs don't count, which kinda sucks, but those are the rules.  It also doesn't have to be perfectly edited either.  It just has to be a story.  So I think...July...I'm not going to school in July.  School starts on Aug. 1st for me...hmm.  I think I can do this.  It'll be good for me.
What in the crap was I thinking????

I started writing at the beginning of the week.  I had a pretty decent word count, I thought.  Then I panicked.  "What if I have ***words and every body else has like 40,000???  I won't be able to keep up with them at all."  This was the message I kept hearing in my head.  "You're gonna be embarrassed if you don't pump out some stories," I kept telling myself.  So I've been sitting at the computer typing out scenes from three different stories now.  Just to keep the creativity flowing, I keep bouncing back and forth.  Why am I so worried about this little blog contest???  It's not like I'm going to get an agent if I win. 
I have this small problem with my personality.
I hate to lose.

Normally, if I lose at a game, I'm ok with it on the outside, but on the inside, I'm that five-year-old kid stomping their foot and being generally ticked off at myself for about five minutes.  Then I'm over it.....but, I still don't like it.
I'm not sure where my competitive streak came from.  I never played sports when I was little other than playing baseball with all my boy cousins.  Both my parents played sports.  Mom played basketball in high school and my dad was a pretty good pitcher for what was a the equivalent of a minor league team back in the '50s'.  Maybe I got it from them.  Who knows?
All I know is it's a character flaw I have no matter how much I try to not let it bother me...it still bothers me.  Maybe it's the whole stubborn thing.

That's a whole other character flaw I have .  You can bet most of my girl characters are stubborn to some degree, because I don't know how to be any other way.  So maybe that's what it is.  I'm too stubborn to accept that I might not win.  This is the one contest that I feel like I might actually have a chance to win, but I doubt it.  After the first week, which I did win, I'm sure everybody else will step up and pass me.

So I guess I'll be getting out the old bowling brace for my wrist because my right hand is killing me and keep typing.  I'm really liking two of the stories I've started.  I wrote on one all last week and this week I'm working on a different one that I'd written three chapters on already.  And then tonight in the car, I had a scene pop in my head about my second book that goes after the very first one I wrote...so I wrote a scene in that one too.
So there's my motivation to write for this month.  Not only do I love to write about all these different characters and places, but I really want to win.   ;)

"Shameless plug" ---You can follow BBC at @bigblackcat97 on Twitter.  There's a link to her blog on here.  She's at "Writer, writer, pants on fire".  So you can click on my link to her page to see the results of her contest....and hopefully my name will still be on top next week. :)