ROW80: Full steam ahead
I am feeling SO GOOD about my current writing project. It’s a contemporary romance with a geeky focus–my domain, if you will. It’s so fun and easy to write right now. Tuesday I got 2200 words, easily exceeding the goal I set for myself and making up for not getting a chance to write on Monday.
Because I am a crazy girl who loves concrete goals with high stakes, I heard about a submission call for an anthology that this story fits in perfectly…so I’ve decided to go for it, even though that means I need to have the story written and edited in about six weeks. It’s for novella length pieces, so that guideline helps me tell the story in a more compact way, which challenges me to tell it in a better way.
I want to make this happen. Badly. Because I want to point to this story and say, “I finished that. I submitted it.” I’m excited about it and only mildly terrified, which I’m sure will rachet up as the due date looms closer. But by my calculations I figure if I stay on the 1500-2000 words a day track, I’ll be done and have plenty of time for edits.
I am also making housework headway…I’ve been a tad stressed with a lot of work projects on my plate, so I have been relaxing my brain by turning on a playlist and Cleaning All the Things. I bought new cleaning supplies and now my kitchen is sparkly clean. I plan on working through the rest as the week progresses.
How is your week going, ROW80ers? Any big news?
ROW80: Time flies when you’re busy as hell
Bless me writers, for I have sinned. It’s been over two weeks since my last check in. How is that even possible? I feel like I blinked and suddenly February is almost over.
The good news is that while I’ve been gone, I got some writing done. I’m a few thousand words into Drawn Together and I am having fun. I’m also writing a TON for work, so it has been hard to turn it back on once I’m home and relaxing. One small drawback of a writing-intensive day job—you aren’t always jazzed about spending your free time trying to make the muses behave. 
This week, however, I will be kicking it into high gear. Drawn is pretty perfect for an anthology call that’s been pointed out to me, which means I have to finish a draft pretty darn soon in order to have it edited, critiqued, and edited some more in time for the submission date. I may not make that, but I’d like to try. Eeek! My goals just get loftier. You’d think I would learn.
Outside of writing, we are just getting more and more ready to move. I can’t wait to be out of our apartment and into our house…especially because of the sweet writer’s den/craft room I’ll have! Do you have a special writing room or area? It will be so fun to set mine up.
So, here are this week’s goals:
- Write at least 1,000 words a day on Drawn. More on Tuesday for sure at my writer hangout.
- Set a plan to meet for writing and editing Drawn for the submission call.
I also want to do at least one chore a day that gets me inching closer to being packed and moved! What are your goals (writing and non-writing) for the week?
ROW80: Birthday week!
So, my birthday is Tuesday, and I tend to have a week-long celebration of sorts. Tomorrow will be fairly low-key, but Tuesday I am going to dinner with girlfriends, Wednesday I’m going for drinks with co-workers, Thursday and Friday are still open for any revelry, and Saturday is my birthday party!
I am smart enough to realize that I am probably not going to get much done this week, so I’m narrowing my focus to the characters in Drawn Together.
I have been working on some character profiles for my two main characters. My goal this week will be to finish them, maybe write a few scenes to figure out their voices, and do some quick profiles for supporting characters. (And do my ROW80 update on Wednesday of course!)
Overall I am happy with my progress…I have kept up with doing a little something on all my goals despite being busy. I really want to kick it into high gear next week so that I can end January feeling accomplished.
In the meantime, I am going to relax, enjoy time with friends, and read on my new Nook Simple Touch (an upgrade from my original Nook, an early birthday gift from my husband!). Have a great week ROW80ers!
ROW80: Quick update
It has been a crazy week for me…big client meeting at work that has required a lot of prep, and with three weeks on the job I have been moving double time to get up to date on things. I will be happy to do some relaxing this weekend, and I know my coworkers will be too. Even with all the crazy this week, I am passionately in love with my new job and I feel so comfortable there. It’s really great to love going to work every day.
Not too much has happened on the writing front other than a very successful goals group meeting (yay!), some research reading and some work on character development for Drawn Together…even so, that still has me hitting goals as long as I write a couple of blog posts. I have been keeping up my other non-writing goals too–tracking what I eat every day and doing an Instagram photo challenge!
How is everyone else doing on the second week of ROW80? I hope to visit the Linky and make some comments when I get a spare moment!
ROW80: Week Two Goals
I have done really well on my first week’s goals…so much so that I am going to keep them for week two. I have gotten to just about everything on my list except character development, which I am planning on working on tonight. I had some unexpected work to do this weekend so I didn’t have as much time to work on writing as I expected. I think the key to my writing goals is to adjust them based on my workload and the things that are going on in my life so that everything works in harmony. That way I don’t have to skip a goal to do something else that is important.
It is a busy week at work so I want to keep my goals easy and accomplishable, which is exactly what my goals are right now. To recap:
- A blog post per week.
- Research on The Recollector
- Character development for Drawn Together
ROW80: So far, so good
It has been a busy week for me, lots of getting further adjusted at the new job and working hard to get up to speed. Even so, I have been doing well on my goals.
- I feel like all I have been doing is writing blogs since that is much of what I am doing at my day job right now! I am on top of the blogging game.
- I researched a lot on possible climactic events and catalysts for The Recollector. I am learning more about one particular event that would be practically perfect. I am saving lots of articles to my Instapaper account to go through as the week progresses.
- I haven’t started my character sketches yet simply because I know I will have more time later in the week for them, and over the weekend.
I feel pretty good…in addition to my writing goals, I am working on two other goals: food journaling and a photo challenge. I write down everything I eat so that I am more conscious of what I put in my body. The list today included delicious things like gourmet food truck burger sliders and a Sprinkles cupcake, but at least I drank plenty of water all day. I am also participating in a photo-a-day challenge on Instagram.. I love using my iPhone to document my life and taking a creative photo every day is really fun.
How are your challenges coming along so far this week? Check out your other ROW80 participants at the blog hop here!
ROW80: Round One Goals
I talked about my overall goal setting for 2012, but now that ROW80 is beginning, it’s time to set my smaller, more specific writing goals. For the first quarter of 2012, I am concentrating on research for one project and outlining another project. I also want to get into a regular blogging schedule.
I know that as the round goes on, my ROW80 goals will change as my focus changes. That is one of the things I love about ROW80–you can change your goals at any time. Once I finish a goal, I can move on to the next one. Here are the high-level Round One goals I am starting off with:
- Finish research for The Recollector. I first started writing this story during NaNoWriMo 2010. I got to 50K with it, but it became clear about 25K through that I hadn’t done nearly enough historical research to do it true justice. It’s set in England during the reign of Queen Victoria and I am twisting some historical events slightly to meet my own purposes. Research is fun for me, but I need to focus and get myself ready to start from scratch on this project.
- Outline Drawn Together. I had a bit of idea lightning hit me a few weeks ago for a contemporary romance. I have never really tried my hand at that, but I think it will be a lot of fun to write. I can easily draw from life experience given the basic plot of the story, which will hopefully make it come together quickly. I would love to start writing this during Round One as well, but I am not even putting that down as a goal until the outline is complete.
- Blog at least once a week. I love blogging and I miss it. I have multiple blogs (which some people would tell you is a no-no, but as a professional marketer I think it is just fine, thanks) about different subjects, and since one of my overall themes of 2012 is to be passionate, I want to start blogging passionately again about the things I am interested in.
The problem with my Round One goals is that they aren’t as measurable as something like a daily word count, especially the research goal. So I am going to set weekly goals for myself that help me fulfill those larger goals. Here are my goals for this week:
- Write at least one blog post for each blog. I am already ahead of the game on this goal, hurrah! I may even be able to get a few in the queue.
- Decide on the main event for The Recollector. I have waffled back and forth on what historical event is going to be the focus for the climax of my story. I keep thinking I have the perfect one, and then two more will crop up that give me pause. I need to decide on this before anything else so I can pick my bad guys!
- Develop character sketches for my two main characters in Drawn Together. I have some basic ideas for my male and female leads, but I really need to flesh them out and give them all kinds of quirks and personality before I start throwing them into an outline.
So how are you setting your goals for this round of ROW80? Do you think I am crazy with my super-specific layers of goals? I can’t wait to read about what everyone else will be doing!
Goal Setting for 2012
Fresh starts have been on my mind all month. I began an amazing new job right before Christmas that I am really excited about. My husband and I will start preparing in earnest for our move later this winter. And, with 2012 looming on the horizon, I am getting serious about writing goals for the coming year.
I am a part of a goals group with some of my writing friends that will help keep us accountable for what we want to accomplish throughout the year. The goals group is actually my first step toward actually meeting my goals–the accountability and encouragement from friends are both super important to me.
To start with, I broke my goals down into quarters. I am concentrating on three things for the first quarter, January-March:
- Outline the contemporary romance idea I have been kicking around, tentatively titled Drawn Together
- Continue research for my alternative historical fantasy, The Recollector
- Figure out what to do with my novel Burn. It has two plot “iterations” and I cannot decide what rabbit trail to go down. Hopefully my group can help me with it!
- Write one blog post a week.
I also plan on participating in ROW80 again (a lot more successfully this time) so that I can boil things down to weekly mini-goals, such as finishing a section of an outline or hitting a daily word count.
This seems like a lot when I write it down, but I have to remember that it is over the course of three months, and if I do a little bit every day, I will meet those goals easily. I know this first quarter will be busy, with a lot to do at my new job and preparing for a move, but if I want to fit fiction writing into my life I have to make it happen even when things are a little crazy.
What are your 2012 goals? Did you meet your goals for 2011? Happy New Year!
Real Life Problems and Thinking About Goals
I can’t believe December is almost here. This year has flown by, and the past month has been strange. My goals for November caved under the news that I was losing my job. I’ve never been laid off before and it has been a very difficult and emotional experience. I was lucky to have some freelance work right away as I looked for a new position, and I’ve had some very promising interviews that I hope will blossom into good news this week. I have been trying to stay as positive as possible, but it is harder than I thought it would be to keep the cheerful face on all the time.
Despite quite a bit more time to myself than I planned, I havent’t been able to concentrate on writing unless it was for my freelance work or a part of my job interviews. I had to accept the fact that with all I have on my mind, National Novel Writing Month simply wasn’t going to happen for me. I have never been so stressed I couldn’t write. I’ve been so busy I couldn’t write, but this has been an entirely new range of emotions. Every time I have sat down to work on my young adult WIP, I haven’t tapped out more than a few lines at a time. I managed to choke out almost 8,000 words of my novel before acknowledging that my hard work was likely needed elsewhere, such as looking for jobs or preparing for interviews. It makes me feel like even more of a failure than the lay off did.
Thankfully, this time of year is about fresh starts. Looking back, October and November have been when I have sunk the lowest…and December and January are when amazing new opportunities have always surfaced. I am going to face 2012 knowing that it holds all the promise in the world and set my goals accordingly.
I am lucky to have some amazing writer friends who not only are awesome and fun ladies, but keep me going when I feel like I can’t do this writing thing. They have their own goals and I love seeing them accomplish new things, like book contracts (!!!!) and new drafts finished. This year we are starting a goals group to keep ourselves accountable and encouraged. I have been thinking a lot about what I want to accomplish in the coming year, and the job loss has actually helped me.
I feel like I’ve started fighting for what I really want again. I have been complacent in the last year professionally, assuring myself that things would get better if I just gave them time. Being laid off has been awful, but it helped me realize that I wasn’t happy. I don’t think I was being utilized as fully as I could have been, and I only have myself to blame for that. I made it clear that I could do things, but I didn’t push for them. That isn’t me…I am pretty confident and I make things happen. But for whatever reason, I wasn’t making things happen, and now that I have some distance from it all, I think it is because I wasn’t in the right place.
Fighting to find (and get!) the right kind of job has also helped me realize that I haven’t been fighting hard enough for my own dreams outside the workplace. There is always the idea in my mind that I can do things later, that I need to see my husband because our schedules are so opposite one another, that I need to have a social life, that I need to relax. Those things are all important, but they don’t fight for my dreams at all. They sometimes hinder moving forward on them, in fact. I need to start fighting myself for the time to make dreams come true.
I know that it won’t be easy…one of the things that was great about my old job is that I could leave work at work most days, and I had a great work-life balance. Doing what I really want to do professionally may mean that I have less of that balance than I have enjoyed the past year, and that means that I need to be even more deliberate about working the dream and goal time into the free time. I will have to make some sacrifices on occasion. But that is okay, because I am coming out of this corner fighting again, and I am willing to do the hard stuff.
Have you ever been through a hard time like this as a writer? What are you doing to realize your dreams in the middle of the rest of your life?
authoress of urban fantasy and paranormal, grammar nerd, serious geek
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