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!

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!

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.

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!

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers

My teaser this week is from the brand new books by one of my most favorite urban fantasy authors, Seanan McGuire. She writes the fantastic October Daye series, and now the InCryptid series. Discount Armageddon, the first InCryptid book, debuts today and I am so excited to begin reading it. Here are the first two sentences:

Verity danced circles around the living room, her amateurish pirouettes and unsteady leaps accompanied by cheers and exultations from the horde of Aeslin mice perched on the back of the couch. The cheering of the mice reached a fever pitch on the few occasions that she actually managed to get both feet off the ground and land again without falling.

If you’ve never tried Seanan McGuire’s books on for size, I highly recommend them. Her October Daye series is chock full of faerie lore and intrigue (as well as Tybaldt, the sexy King of Cats). She also writes as Mira Grant, author of the excellent Feed trilogy, which I also recommend with both thumbs. Happy release day, Seanan!

“It is nice out,” Max admitted. “And if you’re sure you’re okay to walk, I’m game.”

“I’m sure,” she said, smiling. “Trust me, I can hold my liquor. Granted, I’m not usually drinking on an empty stomach, but I’d say that physical assault, public embarrassment, and theft of intellectual property make for some extenuating circumstances.”

“You use big words when you’re drunk,” Max chuckled.

I never thought I’d write a straight up romance novel, even though all of my work has some element of romance to it because I love the development of relationships. This is probably the most fun I’ve had in a long time while writing, and I’m already half in love with Max myself (don’t tell my husband, though Max borrows heavily from his personality). Thanks for reading!

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.

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!

Last night my site went down–all my sites, in fact, since they run off the same place. I frantically dialed tech support and something was wrong with that particular server. I figured it would be back up before I went to bed…but it wasn’t back up until almost lunch time today.

I was fortunate in that I hadn’t lost anything. Nothing here is so important or precious that I’d have been devastated if it were lost, but I would have certainly been upset and annoyed, both with my host and myself. I haven’t had any trouble or downtime with my host in almost a decade, which is a great track record, but I’ve grown complacent and not been putting up that extra bit of security by backing up my blog.

There are a number of easy ways you can back up your blog, and if you’re using WordPress many of them are available as plugins. I myself use wp Time Machine and I just set it up to back up to my Amazon S3 account. If you don’t know what Amazon S3 is, it’s scalable, flexible storage that you pay a small fee to use ONLY the space you’re taking up at a time. For me that currently equates to less than 10 cents per month. You can also use wp Time Machine to back up to Dropbox (which I couldn’t get to work) or FTP. I even have mine set to back up every time a new event (like a post) occurs. So as soon as I publish this little PSA, a new backup will be sent to my archives and I can rest assured that if my host ever goes out again, I’m covered.

Moral of the story: back up, back up, back up. Just in case. You won’t always be as lucky as I was last night.

• 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!