A Friendly Competition (with a side of Shame and Greed)

Every now and then, you’ll hear us talk about “writing challenges” here on the blog. You challenge yourself to write X number of pages in X amount of time. Usually it’s a daily page total. You let the others know your goal and check in with your progress. A great idea, right?

Well, there are two flaws to the average writing challenge:

1) If you don’t make your goal for the day, there’s no real penalty.

2.) The pages don’t have to be any good. You can write garbage and still get credit for meeting your page goal.

So, while they're a good idea, the shame factor is relatively low and you're not really competing against anyone but yourself.

Smarty Pants and I are obviously having some motivation problems. WIP issues we don’t know how to fix, life issues that need to be dealt with, and confidence issues of feeling we suck have all worked together to stall out our manuscripts. Something must be done or else these books will languish forever.

Saturday night, we hit on something that should kick our butts in to gear. A competition. Well, more than a competition or a writing challenge. More like a bet. A down and dirty bet.

We have the same goal—140 pages. (That’s not an arbitrary number—we have reasons for that page count). However, they must be 140 GOOD pages. Not pages of “blah, blah, blah, I’ll fix that later.” Not pages of crap that must be massively edited to be presentable. The goal is 140 pages of good, “ready-for-prime-time” stuff. That may mean rewriting. That may mean going back to page 13 to change something and having to deal with the ripple effect though all the pages that follow. (Critique Partners, brace yourselves.) We’re going for Quality as well as Quantity.

There’s no set time limit, other than First One to 140 Wins. But it is a race. No dawdling and fiddling around.

And there will be a prize. In addition to gaining bragging rights and avoiding public shame, we decided there needs to be a tangible prize. Something we want. Something we wouldn’t want to lose. Shame and competitiveness will only go so far. We’re going for the baser motivations like greed as well.

That’s where we’re stuck. We need y’all to help us come up with a prize. Remember, it needs to be tangible and it needs to be good. We’re avoiding cold hard cash or really expensive things (partly because I’m a kept woman these days and feel bad about betting too much money I don’t actually earn). Manual labor can be involved—the painting of each other’s offices did come up in negotiations. We’re not into public humiliation beyond having to admit on the blog that we lost. Nudity is also out. Y’all know us pretty well by now; what do you think a good prize would be? What would you want if you were in our shoes?

Give us your ideas for the Grand Prize (If it’s what we chose—or leads us to the final choice, I’ll send you an awesome prize pack of your own.)

The start date has been set for August 13, so we have less than a week to come up with final terms. Help us out, then be ready for a ring-side seat as PC and SP go keyboard to keyboard in a no-holds-barred race to 140.

Knowing us, this should be interesting...

PC

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PS: Our first MOANday winner is Ellie! Email Angel for your prize.

PPS: In a late-breaking addition, erotica writer Colette Gale will be here tomorrow!