I'm not sure I thought this through.

I have found the flaw in my plan to hold myself publicly accountable in my writing.

I knew there had to be one.

If you’ve been paying any attention to the progress meter I keep in the sidebar, you might have noticed that, earlier this week, it dropped from something like 79%, back down to 58%. I also pushed the deadline out a month.

This isn’t a bad thing. Turns out that this story (working title: Z.A.U., which doesn’t actually mean anything) is about thirty thousand words longer than I’d originally planned. The story’s progressing well, and I’m almost exactly where I expected to be at this point. But I have too many subplots, and there was no way I could see wrapping them up in 10,000 words. The story has to be longer, and I’m giving myself until the beginning of November to get it done. (I’m not sure if I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year, but if I am, I don’t want to be worrying about this story.)

None of this would be an issue, except… that stupid progress bar! I went from nearly finished to just-past-half-way-done, and it was right there for everyone to see! I actually held off from changing it for two days, simply because I didn’t want to see it drop.

I’m being irrational, I know.

It is helping. I really do feel like I’m making progress on this story, and watching that bar creep slowly upwards (or left, I guess) provides a surprising amount of motivation, which was the whole point.

Still. I liked it better at 80%.