The one thing that doing all these races has taught me is that I'm highly motivated by medals. When I don't feel like walking for half an hour, I remind myself that it nets me another medal. That gets me moving.
It also started me thinking. If it works for working out, would it work for writing? Like a medal for every 10,000 words.
No one had created anything like this that I could find doing some online searching. I checked into having medals made specially for word count, but the cost had me rethinking that idea.
And really? Medals for writing 10K, 20K, 30K, etc might be cool for one book, but twenty books from now? Probably not.
I tried searching for other ideas for rewards. Most of them weren't of interest to me. Spa day. Lunch out. Read a book. Watch TV for an hour. None of these ideas is going to goad me along like a medal would.
Was there something I could buy as a treat for reaching word count or chapter goals?
I thought about that for a little while, too, but it would have to be something I wouldn't buy myself normally and that makes it hard. One thing I have in my wish list is a tiara. That's something I probably wouldn't actually buy.
I know, you're thinking tiara? Really? Well, yes. One of the reasons why I trained and trained to do a 5K race before the pandemic was that one of the items you were given along the route was a tiara. It turned out to be plastic, which was a brutal disappointment, but I guess I should have expected that. (I also got a MEDAL!)
Amazon sells tiaras that are not plastic for brides, prom, etc. But then I thought what am I going to actually do with a real tiara? The plastic one sits atop a jewelry case in my bedroom, collecting dust and it means something because I seriously earned that thing.
So I crossed tiara off the reward list.
This leaves me with no rewards. Someone needs to make medals for writers.
