write my autobiography

I’ve just noticed that it’s been 9 months since I last updated this goal! In that time, my word count has more than doubled, and now stands at 93,000. The big 100,000 is fast approaching.

I’ve documented so much of my life, but there is also so much that I still haven’t. I said towards the start of 2009 that I was going to aim to have this goal completed by the end of this year, but I now realise this is not possible. I think I can have all the content finished and edited by the end of 2010 if I keep working at it, but since I intend to write the entire thing up by hand, I can’t see this goal being truly complete until at least 2012. I am enjoying it though, and I’m really proud of myself for sticking it out this long. When I started this goal I wasn’t sure whether I could make it last, or if it would just get neglected after the first few thousand words, but I’ve achieved a lot and I’m glad that I haven’t given up.

So in summary, I’m still just plodding along!

...since I last updated this goal, but it’s nice to see that a few other people have added entries in that time.

Throughout most of the year I’m too busy to dedicate much time to writing, but this is one of the rare few periods where I do. My word count is currently about 42,500 and I’m hoping to be somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 by the end of the holidays.

I’m placing less emphasis on editing and organising my writing at the moment. I’m jotting down memories as they come to me and I will structure them and fill in the gaps at a later date.

I’m hoping to have this goal complete by this time next year.

Anyone else want to join me in working on this goal? I’m going to end up filling the entire page alone otherwise!

I feel like I haven’t made all that much progress during week because I’ve generally been too weary to do much work so I’ve been working hard this weekend to compensate. My word count has gone up quite a bit (now on 31000 words) but it’s all raw. I need to do a lot of editing and reordering but that’s less fun than writing and after a long day/week at work it’s one of the last things I want to do.

I will have a week to myself between finishing working at starting back at University, so hopefully I can use that time to edit and feel more motivated about it. My aim is to have my life up to and including the age of 16 written and full edited by the end of the summer, but not transcribed. Transcribing will take a lot of time but it will be less tiring so that’s something I can do during whatever free time I get during term time.

I also don’t know when I’ll get chance to finish up this goal. The worst-case scenario is that the project gets abandoned between September and the following June, but I don’t really want it to come to that. I know that I’m more likely to finish it if I’ve broken the back of it already; it’ll be a less daunting task then.

...but I seem to be the only person working towards it at the moment. I’m feeling a little guilty about cluttering up so much of the “write my autobiography” page alone!

Anyway, back on topic. I’m on about 18,000 words now. I was worried that it wouldn’t all fit into the book I bought by the time I finished, but after a quick calculation I reckon that I’ll need 80,000 words to fill the book. I might reach that, but I don’t mind spilling over into another one, I just didn’t want to end up with a “volume 3 of 10” type situation.

I realised today that if I actually want to get this goal ticked off within the next year then I’m going to have to write the bulk of it over the next two months because when University starts again I won’t have enough time. Problem is, I’m working full time during the holidays as well so I just don’t have enough time to devote to this as I’d like.

I am enjoying writing it though. I’ve been digging out old books and diaries for inspiration and it’s quite fun reading through them. I’ve stumbled across a few things that I’d completely forgotten about!

Every morning during the commute to work I write. I pick an area of my life that I haven’t covered yet and write down everything that I can remember about it. I often don’t finish it, but that gives me something to edit and to work from later.

I’ve covered the first seven years of my life so far (although I have no memory of the first two and a half years, and my other memories from that age are far more fuzzy and faded) and I’m already on around 12,000 words. I’m trying to write in chronological order and I want to get stared on the write-up, now that I’ve already written about the earliest years of my life, but the problem is that I’m still thinking of new things to add. I’m raring to go but I also don’t want to write it all out and then remember something that I should have added.

I’ve been doing a lot of work towards this goal this week. It’s such a big job; I keep thinking of new things to add and it’s hard to make all the little anecdotes flow together, but I’m pleased with how it’s turning out so far. I’ll be interested to see what the final word count is by the time I’ve written the whole thing and finished everything.

My plan was always to handwrite my autobiography (after drafting and editing it all on the computer first) and I’ve had my eye on some beautiful book-bound notebooks in Paperchase for a while. I found a really lovely one the other day – deep purple, with butterflies on the cover. It’s really inspired me to carry on with this goal, because I look at the 400 blank pages of thick, creamy paper and just itch to fill them!

I won’t let myself start until I’ve fully drafted and edited though, because I don’t want to write something and then remember something that I’ve missed, or decide that the quality isn’t good enough, because something like that could ruin the whole thing. So I’ve still got quite a bit of work ahead of me.

After pretty much ignoring this goal for several weeks, I suddenly had a burst of creativity yesterday and wrote 3000 words! Desperately trying to get that feeling back today; if only it would last!

I’m mostly writing about the things that have happened in the past year or so, because they’re the most fresh in my mind. Things would be easier if I wrote chronologically though: I’m typing my autobiography at the moment but I want the final version to be handwritten and I can’t start writing up what I’ve already got until I’ve written the beginning.

I think this whole process is going to take me years though. I’m working on it slowly when I have free time but I just have so much work to do that it doesn’t happen very often.

I’ve started this one, it’s going slowly.

I did find a new burst of inspiration the other day though. I was in Paperchase and saw some beautiful blank-page notebooks, really thick ones. I’m a sucker for fancy stationery and I wanted one but knew it would be a waste of money because I’d never use it. So I figure that if I can finish typing my memoirs then I can buy one of the notebooks (actually I’ll probably need more than one) and hand-write it.