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.
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!
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?
It’s that time of year…
It’s October. The air is getting crisper (and for Dallas, that means under 90), the leaves are turning (and for Dallas, that means dying and falling off the trees), and it’s time to prepare like crazy for writing 50,000 words in 30 days.
NaNoWriMo (otherwise known as National Novel Writing Month) is the 30 days out of the year that I go momentarily insane and decide that even though it’s the start of what always turns out to be the busiest time of year, both personally and professionally, it’s a GREAT idea to write at least 1,667 words per day. This year it’s going to be compounded by the fact that my husband and I are moving into a house in January and we have a LOT of wallpaper stripping and painting to do (and an estate sale to have) as well as an entire apartment to pack. Crazy? Yeah, that’s me.
Writing on a novel can be really hard for me to do every day because, well, I do it every day. A large part of my job involves writing and being creative. I have been feeling creatively numb the last few months and not inspired. I have to be rigid about making myself write regularly and, quite frankly, I have failed miserably.
All this makes it sound like NaNo is a terrible idea for me, but it is actually great. NaNo holds me accountable and makes me re-form my habits of writing every day OUTSIDE the office. NaNo pushes me and challenges me. It can be a chore sometimes, but if I am unmotivated it completely reinvigorates my creativity and my writing. I am looking forward to that.
I am trying to write on an idea that I have been messing with since 2005. Its current incarnation is a YA fantasy. I’ve tried more than once to write it for NaNo and failed–both at getting to 50K and at completing the story. This year will be the year I tackle it head on and make it work. I am really excited about the plot right now because I feel like I have worked out some of the issues that made it not work before.
Another reason I really enjoy NaNo is that it gives me the perfect excuse to hang out with the friends I made LAST NaNo. My husband has a crazy school and work schedule that keeps him out until around 11 every night now, so I need something to do to keep me occupied other than packing and stripping floral wallpaper off my future library room walls.
I will be spending the next 20 days fleshing out the main plot points of my novel and working on an outline. I am not a pantster, though sometimes I play one at work. I write best and easiest when I have a plan in front of me (or at least really, really good notes). I wouldn’t have gotten to 50K the last couple of years without my super detailed outlines. If I discover anything as I write, it is the characters and their personalities. The plot has to be planned out pretty well for me to churn through the required wordcount. I want to be ready to start pounding out words on November 1.
Who else is doing NaNoWriMo? Are you getting ready?
ROW80 Check-In: Cart and Horse
So, I appear to have put the cart before the horse (as usual).
Last week felt like a really good, productive week from a writing perspective, even though I didn’t get more written than a couple thousand words on a semi-detailed, high-level plot outline. I did quite a bit of reading and research for my novel, which I really need to do in order to get it right. I set a writing goal of 1,000 words a day; for the days I wrote, I met my goal. But I set my goal without really hitching my cart up to my horse first. Research comes BEFORE writing. Logically, I know this, but I am so excited about writing this story I almost forgot.
Some people might tell you to just jump right in on the first draft, get the bones of the story down, and worry about making it truly realistic in your edits. For certain kinds of stories I might agree with them, but not for a story like this. One thing I appreciate as a reader is a detailed, clearly well-researched historically based novel. Even though I am twisting history, I want to get the details right. I also need to get the details of Victorian life just right or the plot isn’t going to come together. I know that from my first draft this story for NaNoWriMo 2010…my character’s backstory was all wrong for the timeline. I got so frustrated during NaNo that the last 25,000 words (everything after I realized it wasn’t working) are probably nothing but fluff. I’ve changed her family and background up so that she has the proper freedoms and constraints for a woman of her time period.
My research is also leading me to setting the story during a different period of the 1800s. Originally I had my eye set on 1897, to take advantage of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, but now I’m leaning toward 1851 and the Crystal Palace. This gives me more opportunity with the Queen, Albert is still alive, and more of her enemies (or sensible ones to create) are available to me. Now I just have to figure out why these historical jerks want to take down the Queen and destroy London!
So, my goals are going to be adjusted slightly: I’m going to write when it makes sense to write during this research period, and when I do, I’m going to write 1,000 words during each session. That’s going to be mostly outlining and notes right now. I’m going to either write or research every day…I managed to do that every day last week and I’m going to keep it up. My goal is to have the research and outline finished out by the end of the month so that I can write in August.
How are you doing so far? Have you already changed your goals?
ROW80 Check-In: Sick of It
I’m still feeling sick, but I know I am getting better. It’s just annoying to be coughing a lot and not able to breathe through my nose without medicinal help. Today is the last day of my antibiotic and hopefully I will be feeling a lot better next week. I’ll keep taking the Zyrtec D until the actual symptoms go away.
I have still managed to get some words in most days this week, though, and I’m proud of that. It hasn’t always been my goal of 3,000, but I think some concessions can be made when one is sick. I wouldn’t have been writing coherent words anyway! I also took the time to read a couple of books during all that, too. I finished the last two books in Zoe Archer’s Blades of the Rose series, and I read the new Sookie Stackhouse. It was nice to recharge a bit with some fun reads and give my mind a rest while my body got its much needed rest, too.
I wrapped up a key scene last night in Burn. I know that my scene transitions need some fleshing out, and that the thread of tension I am pulling between my main character and one of the supporting characters probably needs a little refining, but I am not letting myself do any editing right now. I’m just making notes as I go and I will fix things in the revisions. Right now I am forcing myself to not be such a damn perfectionist the first time around. It’s something I struggle in all my writing, whether it’s direct response marketing or fiction, but I have gotten a lot better about too much editing in the first draft.
My goals for this week are pretty simple:
- Write at least 3,000 words on Burn every day.
- Write a blog post for each of my blogs.
I really want to get heads down on Burn, both because I really want to finish the first draft this month and because I want to keep up the momentum for my Savvy Bootcamp Team! We are doing really well right now, and I want to keep contributing to our overall success.
Anyone else out there fighting through a summer cold or infection to get your words written? Don’t be discouraged…just write when you can. I try to remind myself that no matter how little I’ve written, it’s more than I had when I started!
ROW80 Check-In: Let the Games Begin
So I did what I planned on doing this week, even though it didn’t feel super productive…I kept plotting out Burn. The plot isn’t 100% planned out on paper, but I feel more than confident with where it’s going. I feel like I can manage it towards the inevitable big events and scenes I have in my head. And, well, if I don’t get those on the nose the first time around, that’s what revisions are for. I’m treating this somewhat like a fast draft just in the interest of not overthinking things too much.
This week my goals are to write as much as possible on my draft. I clocked in at 5,172 words for today, which made me very happy! I did a few #1k1hr sprints and logged some major wordcount in the first one–over 2,000 words! I like the new direction I am taking the story from its original inception a lot. I think that makes it easy to write. I don’t know that I’ll get 5,000 words tomorrow, but I’d like to try to get at least 3,000. That’s my daily minimum goal for the week, considering I have a lot of work-related writing to do and that can sometimes sap my creative strength by the time I get home.
So, here is my updated set of goals:
- Write at least 3,000 words a day on Burn.
- Finish the first draft of Burn in May. I am part of Team KickA$$ for the Savvy Authors May Bootcamp and I am planning on writing my butt off to keep up with my prolific team members, so this shouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility!
- Finish reading Story Engineering by Larry Brooks.
Once I am done with Burn, I am going to table it for a while and pick up The Recollector, the novel I started in November for NaNoWriMo. I realized about 25,000 words in that it needed a LOT more planning and research than I had put into it prior to November 1, so the last 25,000 words are probably a load of desperate garbage. But I still really like the idea, I just need to flesh it out and get my character’s backstory to a realistic, workable place. Historical fiction, be it alternative like mine or 100% historically accurate, is hard but I think very fun and rewarding.
Hope everyone has a fantastic ROW80 week! I’m ready for some real progress after two weeks of not feeling like I made much.
ROW80 Check-In: It’s a Wash
Last week was so bad I didn’t even check in on time. Yeah…it was bad. I had a headache for six days straight, sometimes migraine strength. Work was crazy because almost everyone was out of the office, making it nearly impossible to get my own work done due to lack of responses, etc. It was very frustrating and it made me crabby and tired. I was snappish with my husband if I wasn’t careful and I went to bed early every night because I felt like the days just couldn’t be salvaged. Wednesday was actually the worst of the days. I just wanted to throw in the towel.
However, it was a three-day weekend and I let it be just that. A weekend…some relaxation, some work. None of that work was my writing, and I was okay with that. I’ve long neglected some housekeeping and organization, and the husband and I tackled that this weekend. I repainted a headboard for our bedroom on Friday and relaxed with some Netflix and the cats. I read a little, I watched TV, I slept a lot, I cleaned even more. It was good. It needed to happen. I feel a little guilty, but not enough to lose sleep over.
This week I am revamping my goals. I’m going to finish planning for Burn. Period. I’m close, but I have some work to do to get it ready for the May Boot Camp that starts this weekend. I want to be ready to jump right in. The rest of my goals aren’t ROW80 goals–they’re goals like finish cleaning and organizing the bedroom, work out at least three times this week, clean out the fridge, and go on a date with my husband. They’re good goals that make me more myself, and when I’m more myself, I’m a better writer. No more bad weeks like last week as long as I have anything to say about it.
Little and Often
I follow a blog called Sustainably Creative by Michael Nobbs. It’s not specifically about writing, but more about the push to be creative and how hard that can be. Michael suffers from Myalgic Encephalopathy/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which can leave him with very low energy levels. That makes it very hard to keep up with a creative career, but Michael manages and that is quite an inspiration to me.
Over the past three years, I have struggled with health problems that left me exhausted, dispirited and uninspired. Things are exponentially better for me now that I know what is wrong with me and how to treat it. I’m back to my old self, feeling great 99% of the time and more creative than ever, but there was a point where I didn’t have the energy to be creative at all. I barely had the energy or to get out of bed and go to work, and even then I didn’t always make it. I was in pain all the time and it wore on me mentally and physically.
Michael posted a blog entry today that I wish I had read when I was feeling bad all the time. I have always been a creative person, and feeling so sick that I didn’t want to write, craft or learn new things was a foreign concept to me. But Michael has a great approach to this that we can all learn from, whether you’re too sick to write or just feeling completely overwhelmed with your project or your life.
Little and often. If you write a little on your WIP every day, you’ll be that much closer to writing “The End” on a future day. If you research a little every day, you’ll be that much closer to being ready to write your historical novel or your sci-fi novella. If you read about the craft of writing a little every day, you’ll be that much more informed and you’ll slowly but surely become a better writer for it.
That has been my mindset for this month of the ROW80 challenge, as well as just rebooting my writing habits in general. I typically thrive under challenges and deadlines, but they can also overwhelm me at times until I power through. This isn’t such an issue now that I have a much better work-life balance than I did before, but it can still happen when a week stacks up just right. But the “little and often” approach makes things so much easier. If I just do a little—a little writing or planning for my blogs, a little plotting on my current WIP, a little freewriting for one of my characters—it’s better than wasting my time bemoaning the fact that I don’t have time to write or I don’t feel like writing. I can always find a few minutes.
Last night I was tired from too little sleep the night before, full from a really great dinner, and all I felt like doing was watching some Netflix and going to bed early. I did those things, but I also did a little plotting on my novel. I didn’t even MEAN to work on it, but before I realized it I had my Scrivener file open and I was working on the story arc. I didn’t do much, but I felt better having done just a little to add to my progress.
Typically during my work day I will take a break for lunch, and then another 15 or 20 minute mind rest later in the afternoon. During these times I try to do something like work on a blog post, write a snippet of dialog, or read a chapter of a book on craft or a novel in my genres. When I get home at night, I will usually relax a little, eat dinner, spend some time with my husband and then work a little more on blogging, plotting or writing. Sometimes I will stop and start that process so I can do things like laundry or cooking. But I try to accomplish something by at least doing a little bit as often as I can.
Remember, if you’re having a crazy day, week or month, you can always make progress. It might not be 2,000 words a day or 50,000 words a month, but moving forward is moving forward. You can sustain your creativity a little at a time, as often as possible.
ROW80 Check-In: Not Too Bad
The first week of ROW80 has drawn to a close and I feel like it was really successful!
I made a lot of progress on getting Burn re-plotted and ready to go and I’m feeling great about that project. My Scrivener file is growing more and more detailed by the day! Today’s progress, though technically part of the upcoming week, was the most awesome. My biggest plot disconnect was worked through during a get together with some of my local writer friends, which makes me even more excited to finish my important (but tedious) outlining and get to writing the new draft!
This week I have some lofty plans:
- I am going to concentrate on fleshing out some of the new characters that have come up during the reimagining of Burn’s plot. I am also going to lay out the big overall story arc and start building the subplots.
- I will finish out the blog articles I have planned and hopefully start to work on a new post series I have in mind for my tech site.
- I am continuing the process of bookmarking and skimming resources for my next writing project, which is an alternative historical fantasy. I’m currently taking a class that I am hoping will give me some great resources, insight and inspiration. One of my favorite authors, Gail Carriger, also happened to post a great list of resources for alt-Victorian history and steampunk writing. My story falls at the tail end of the Victorian times, during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, so I look forward to perusing some of the links Gail shared.
I have to admit, though…I failed at my goals on Saturday. I had a rough week migraine-wise and that always leaves me pretty tired and feeling not so hot, which led to a completely lazy day that involved me collapsed in a lump on the couch, lots of television, the latest Raine Benares book and a few games of Tiny Wings on my iPhone.
It made me think about the fact that I should probably build an “off day” into my goals that I can use if I need to. I would love to work on my writing every day, but that isn’t necessarily the most realistic thing in the world. However, I don’t really want to give myself an “out” during a writing challenge. I also don’t want to have an exception that may break the good writing habits I’m trying to rebuild.
What do you think, fellow ROW80ers? Do you give yourself a day of rest, or do you push through and work on your goals every day?
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