ROW80: Wrapping up
We made it! This round of ROW80 is over and it has been insanely productive for me.
I’ve hit all my goals–I’ve worked on the research for The Recollector (so I have tons more reference material when I pick that project back up), I’ve sent Burn off to friends who can help me figure out the right direction to take on the plotting, and I’m almost done writing Drawn Together!
I may not write “The End” on Drawn by Sunday as planned since this is an insanely busy week, but I will be close. It feels good to have accomplished so much in this round, especially when I have a ton of things going on outside of my writing. I hope to do the next round too, but I may be taking a slight break in between projects so I might jump in after the round starts.
Thanks for a great run ROW80!
ROW80: The home stretch
The end of the round is almost here! I can feel my motivation flagging…it’s been a busy weekend and zero writing time, and now that I’m trying to write, the scene is not working. The story is at a critical, difficult turning point, and I think I’m just getting stuck on the action that needs to push the narrative forward. I’m opting to go to bed and wake up refreshed tomorrow, but this week I am kicking it into high gear to catch up! I can see the end in sight.
I’m glad this project is nearing completion, because real life is going to have to take a bit of a front seat for a while. I need to start sorting and packing for our move–it’s going to be a beast, so I want to start now. I have a feeling my closet is going to get filled with boxes very soon (to keep them away from the kitties, who enjoy their cardboard scratchers and think boxes are for claw sharpening)! I also need to start gathering the necessary painting supplies…all the wallpaper at our house is gone (they removed it rather than texturing over) and the walls are retextured, so things will be ready to paint as soon as the estate sale is over. I want to be prepared to get in there and get it done as soon as possible, because I am ready to move!
For this week:
- I’d love to get 3K a day on Drawn Together. I’m still behind from being sick, and I want to get ahead early in the week so I can sail through the finish line.
- Take one day of breathing room and start edits on Drawn. My submission deadline is April 15!
Head on over to the link list to cheer on your ROW80 compatriots! Let’s cross this finish line together!
ROW80: Getting over it and getting things done
So I missed my Sunday wrap-up of last week, but my Friday post really covered it. It wasn’t a great week thanks to being sick. I was kind of bummed about my week on Sunday (when I was feeling MUCH better), but I knew that I couldn’t go into this week with a bad attitude. I have a BOOK to finish!
This week has been churning right along. I’m a bit behind on my goal at this point thanks to being sick, but only by a couple thousand words. It’s nothing I can’t make up for by writing above my daily minimum this week. It doesn’t put me actually behind my original due date of March 24, since my daily minimum adjusts accordingly. Even so, I’d like to get ahead of myself again so that I can wrap this book up by mid-week at the latest. I’m eager to get to editing!
I also may have accidentally developed ideas for a second, third, and fourth book in this little universe of mine. Making it into a series would be so much fun! Each book could stand alone but would definitely pull pieces and characters from the other books. Things have fallen into place for this story and these people in my head in ways I never imagined or hoped for. I’m having a blast.
So, for my goals this week: my focus is still hacking away at my word count and getting this book to the finish line. I’m at just over 25K now, should be at at least 27K tonight, and I’m shooting for around 40K total before I get to editing.
If I have any downtime, or need a bit of a mental break, I’m going to work on the site for my pseudonym. I need to get that sucker up ASAP!
How is your week going, fellow brave writers? Check in with our other ROW80 friends here.
Friday Fail: Sinus Infection,The Reckoning
So this week kind of fell apart on Wednesday. I came home from my weekly Team Awesome writing date on Tuesday night and promptly got a spell of vertigo when I went to bed. You know that feeling when you’ve had too much to drink, and when you lie down to sleep it off you stop moving but the room keeps going? Yeah, that, except without any fun imbibing beforehand. It’s happened to me only twice before and it’s a bit scary.
I woke up on Wednesday morning feeling quite sick from all the crazy dizziness and managed to get it to stop long enough for me to go to work. I stayed until lunchtime and decided the doctor was probably in my best interests. On the way to the doctor, I started getting a migraine and all the additional fun that entails. Then, when the doctor saw me, she informed me…I have a raging sinus infection AGAIN and the vertigo is a fun new migraine symptom. Lovely. So, to recap:
Blinding facial pain due to migraine + blinding facial pain due to sinus infection = No writing (or ROW80 check-in, for that matter)
I am feeling a bit better today now that my fever has broken, though I still have a toned down version of said blinding facial pain and I’m so tired I’m about to face plant on my desk. Thankfully I was already almost 2,000 words ahead of my goal, and as of today I’m only about 330 words behind where I should be in order to finish the novella by March 24. So, that’s a relief. I am hoping for a great writing day on Sunday that will help me get back ahead of my goal.
I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll be feeling a lot better tomorrow so I can enjoy the day my husband and I have planned to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary. I hope everyone else is having a great week!
ROW80: Creating a habit
This has been another great week, despite losing a day to a migraine that started Wednesday night and took me out for all of Thursday. I managed only 66 words on Thursday, but I was proud of even getting those down considering how bad I felt! I finally had to shut the laptop because it was just too painful to look at anything bright, even with the backlight turned all the way down on my screen.
I haven’t had the 2K days I enjoyed last week, but I have plugged along steadily and exceeded my daily planned goal by at least a little bit every day but Thursday. It hasn’t always been easy, as I’ve been tired and have a bunch of good new books to read, but I’m still super excited about this project and really enjoying myself while writing it.
This constant push to meet a daily goal has really helped me in re-creating my writing habits. They have been in woeful disrepair for too long, and it feels so good to finally get in the groove again. I’ve written over 6K since Monday and hopefully today I will have a little more time to write and get myself to the 20K mark on my draft! I’m about 2K ahead of where I should be in my planned goal despite losing a day this week, so that feels really great. I’ve added a word count meter to my sidebar to keep myself motivated.
I had two more awesome things happen this week–I found out that I don’t have to strip wallpaper in our house after all! I got one wall almost done, but we were talking with our contractor about retexturing the drywall underneath, and he said that it’d be better and easier to just prime and retexture right over the existing paper! One less step is fine by me. I can’t wait to get to the painting…I have all our colors picked out, except for my studio. I’m still waffling on that one.
The BEST thing about the week happened on Saturday, though…my husband and I scored badges to San Diego Comic Con in July! Tickets went on sale early in the morning and we parked in front of my laptop with our fingers crossed. We were over 10,000th in line when we got into the online ticket waiting room, but we managed to grab two 4-day passes right before they sold out. It’s our first time to go and we’ve both wanted to for a long time, so it will be a fun vacation. I even managed to score us the last room at a hilariously themed but awesome B&B right across from Balboa Park and the San Diego Zoo for our stay. It’s totally affordable, has great amenities, is in a great location, and should get us away from the daily crazy. We’re beyond thrilled to finally visit Geek Mecca.
Finally, my goals for this coming week:
- Keep up the pace on Drawn Together! I am so proud of my current progress and I can’t afford to lose any steam if I’m going to make my goal date and get this thing polished for submission.
- Write a few more non-ROW80 blogs.
- Work on the site for my romance-related alter ego.
How has your week been, ROW80-ers? Are you meeting your goals? Have any lofty new ones for the week ahead? Click here to check out how everyone else is doing.
ROW80: Keeping up the momentum
I’m still barreling ahead with progress on Drawn. It hasn’t been as prolific a week so far, but I’ve managed to exceed my daily minimum by at least a few words every day and I’ve got more than 14,000 words down of the story. It feels good to blow way past my daily goal, but giving myself permission to just meet the goal and not try anything fancy is important too.
One of the reasons I haven’t been writing quite as much this week is because I started stripping wallpaper at our house. We’re aiming to move in by the end of April, which means we have a LOT of work to do on the painting front. I want to get all the wallpaper off the walls and have them ready to paint by March 24, the same due date I’ve given myself for Drawn. I will feel a lot better once I know that we can attack things with paintbrushes as soon as the estate sale is over, which should be coming up in a few weeks. In the meantime, I can knock out a lot of work. It’s a little intimidating because I’ve never done any home improvement or repairs before, having always lived in apartments. But it’s exciting…especially planning out the paint and floorplan for my very own writing and craft studio!
How are your goals coming, fellow ROW80ers? Happy Leap Day!
ROW80: Rocking weekly goals like a boss
I love the incredible feeling of accomplishment that comes from meeting your writing goals. I said I was going to kick it into high gear, and I did. To recap, my goals for last week were as follows:
- 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.
This week I ended up writing over 12,000 words. Monday was the only day I didn’t meet my bare minimum goal, and Friday was the only other day I wrote under 2,000 words. The story is flowing so well, and it’s so fun to write. I’ve never written a contemporary romance before, but I love my characters and their voices. I’ve been excited to go to the keyboard every day, and doing it even when I’ve been too tired because I am THAT eager to keep the story moving forward. I even managed to get a bit above my minimum goal on Friday, when I had a migraine. That is a huge accomplishment for me, because even thinking can be difficult when a migraine has taken hold.
I did it all to stay on the plan that I set for myself on Tuesday. I figured out how much time I think I’ll need for editing and a quick run through from my crit group, and planned backwards. I am using David Gale’s awesome tool WriteTrack to keep track of my word count, because it recalculates your bare minimum to reach your goal date based on the amount of writing you log. Right now my bare minimum is down to 1,030 words a day to complete 40,000 words by March 24, but if I keep to my current pace I should finish at least a week early. I’ve been shooting for at least 2,000 words a day, but it’s nice to know that as long as I get about half that, I don’t have to worry.
My goal for the week is simple–keep plugging away on Drawn. I want to get at least my bare minimum per day but am shooting for more like 2,000 words a day to keep my momentum. I’m also planning on setting up a new website for my romance alter ego and doing some blogging. But the main goal and total focus is those words. I am determined to make that anthology call and getting the words on the screen is the only way that’s going to happen!
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: Not so fast, apparently
Let me say this first…I am still feeling VERY positive about this week. Seriously.
With that said, I have not accomplished even a smidgen of my weekly goals so far.
This week has been another high octane one at work. In addition to my daily job of marketing and social media, I’m doing the PR for a new client alongside my boss. I really love PR and how enmeshed it is with social, but it can be time consuming and very quick turn. I spent hours today writing, editing, and editing some more. I’m happy with the results, and more importantly, the client is. But I’m burned out for today. The past two nights I’ve been busy until late and then just fallen into bed, exhausted.
Tonight I don’t have to pull a late one, and I’ve had the opportunity to relax, to do a few chores, to let my brain rest. It’s all I can do to even type a blog post. And you know what? That’s okay. My book will be here tomorrow.
authoress of urban fantasy and paranormal, grammar nerd, serious geek
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