Recent Progress for February

She's back! To write more personal stuff!

I haven't kept up with posting updates much thanks to a few factors. One of which was being sick the last few weeks. I lost a lot of time sleeping and being grumpy but managed to achieve a few things:

• Finished Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg and wrote a very short opinion on the book to work on my reviewing skills, and started Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.
• Got to page 80 of LBW. If the ideas keep flowing and I keep up two pages a day then I'll be making sweet progress. Actually I'd be happy with just a page a day or four pages a week.
• Low standards? Nope, I'm just a slow writer with trouble getting ideas. Goal: page 90 by March 5^th 
• Started my first weekly critique after a short break. By the way, I recommend Critique Circle, great place.
• Finished the paper revision I was doing of Serpenttongue. Now I'm plugging it in and making slight revisions as I go. Still finding spots lacking something uncertain, but there's always another go-through. I haven't set any goal other than be past chapter 25 by month's end.
• Still working on a new short story featuring my vampire. It's proving difficult to write. I just don't know the story. Goal: just work on it!

I have uber faith I can succeed, especially if I spend more days getting up at three like I did Thursday. I went back to sleep of course, but I figure why not use that time if I'm up anyway.

What are your goals for the rest of the month?

August in Review

August is concluded. Pretty sure I completed most of my goals, or enough of them to be satisfied with myself considering three weeks of crushing frustration about writing and plotting.

I have discovered the timer is my friend. With the help of the yTimer program*, I've managed to get more done this month than in past attempts, and I'm only doing 30 minute intervals.

The reasons (in a bullet list!):

• Forces me to focus on one thing at a time, and not worry/consider/daydream about anything else because I have a limited amount of time to work before the obnoxious buzzing occurs.
• Allows me to focus on task at hand because I know that I only have to toil at it for 30 minutes before I can fly from my chair and forget about it for a while instead of staring at a page blankly until I nod off.
• I don't stare at a blank page until I doze off. Somehow, actually having a timer cut back on the frequency of dozing off at my desk, and proceeding irritation of trying to translate what I wrote down right before sleep struck. It wasn't cool in high school, and it isn't cool now.
• Hand-in-hand with the previous, the 30 minute timer buzzes before boredom swoops in and I start playing with fonts in the editor or embellishing letters and doodling in page margins.
• The short breaks between force me to get up and handle other tasks, like preparing for the next day of work, getting more water, or just stretching (which helps with that whole falling asleep issue – who knew?)

Don't ask me why I didn't take to this strategy sooner when I've read and printed so many articles about it already.

I still have the impression of time missing in my week. I've been using methods to track my hours, but still haven't found all those missing minutes. Maybe they never leave bed when I get up in the morning.

Writing

1.      Made it to the end of the first scene of the new short I'm working on. Haven't devoted much time to it.

• Sketched a brief outline for the short.

1.      Still struggling with outline for LBW, but stumbled across a blog, Do-It-Yourself MFA(DIYMFA), with helpful articles, and through playing around with a mind mapping app to make character sketches I surprised myself by finding more ideas for back story, and a few for the plot.

• I also played around with free form character interviews of two characters, and dug up some more back story.

Revision

1.      The short in revision is, well, still in revision. It's one of three stories I've ever done that began right in the middle of the action, and not before. It feels cheesy for that reason, but maybe it really isn't.

2.      ST is so close to being done its 2^nd revision. Goodness, it's been a chore. Call me Madame Treeslayer.

I'm working to take the advice of numerous writers and break writing tasks down to the smallest goals possible. I do it all the time with my daily chores, but never tried with writing. I'm thinking it might help.

Hmm...I should probably decide what my goals for September will be too.

*yTimer by Spacejock software. Free to download and use. I am a fan of his yWriter program, which is how I found the timer.

End of the Month Update

Goodbye July, and hello August. Yet another month has come and gone already.

I tried hard, but my birthday was not to be resisted. It bowled me over, leaving an achy 27 year old me in its wake. I would have let this atrocity go without complaint, except the cheesecake I brought for my birthday was beyond mediocre, and there are some things I just can't let go.

Turns out I did not accomplish my writing goals for the month, because of personal oversight, as is usually the case.

Fireworks, Flame-grills, and Fantastic Fabrications

July, here again, hot and heavy. Tomorrow will bring fireworks and smoking grills, and my least-favorite question to be asked, “What are you doing for your birthday?” That question never gets easier to answer.


I do have plans to get a fair amount of writing and revision done during this yucky month.

Busy, Busy Day

Saturday was the Walk; I began at roughly 9am and ended around 10:40am with barely a throb of soreness or exhaustion. It was a nice walk around a nice area. It gave me time to think and try to recall the sensations you get from a park (or near a lake, or in a wooded area).

That failed. I lifted my mood by taking in the scenery, but thanks to the heat it was hard to notice anything other than "It's hot!"
I figured I would go ahead and put up a picture of the team I walked with, and horrible camera pictures of the view.



Oh yes, and still working on Serpenttongue, almost to the second to last chapter. Being so close to the end of the manuscript I've worked on sporadically for the past two years gives me a strange feeling. It's not despair, disappointment, or joy just...different.

Why Yes, I AM Still Alive...And I've Done Stuff Too.

Hello, hello, been awhile of silence but I'm back-hopefully for more than three bad posts. Life kind of crept up on me, reenacting the shower scene from Psycho. I didn't die, but it halted things for some time. I've caught up, mostly: gotten used to the busy mornings, the afternoon exercises, the strange disappearance of that block of time between morning and evening. It's ironic that right after I created and printed a schedule for myself, everything kind of back-flipped, so I have to analyze my days again.

So, on April 17th, 2010 I attended a festival with my sister, the Black Heritage Festival at University of Baltimore. There were vendors and performances-mostly vendors-and it was a nice taste of what she and I are in for.
I mention the festival because our table happened to be right across from the table of an author who also runs a publishing house (J.M. Benjamin, A New Quality Publishing). He made conversation with us, gave me a little info about writing a synopsis (or at least something to tell people on the street when they ask what I'm writing) as soon as possible, and told me to try submitting work to them to see where I'm at. I made my first connection, woo!

I did something I have never really considered before on Tuesday. I always read people's suggestions on other places you can go to write and thought "yeah, that sounds good" with a noncommittal nod to myself, but for whatever reason it occurred to me to spend my free day there. I didn't get many pages, but the atmosphere was a nice change; with nothing in the environment to distract me it was a bit easier to get coherent lines on the page.
It was a nice experience for me...or maybe it was the hot chocolate. I learned two things: I need to be in the library writing more often, and Seattle's Best makes very sugary hot cocoa, or sugary vanilla, or sugary hazelnut, I threw both in so I'm still narrowing down the suspects.
It hadn't occurred to me until a few days prior that the notebook was nearly full, and I was but two chapters away from the ending...and that I'd wasted most of the month being lazy instead of working toward my goal of finishing before May.
I did the same thing in February, and March. Pattern?
I think I've made some good progress. There's a frame, but the door is still under construction...and someone painted the bottom half puce instead of white. I'm not an expert painter, but I can fix it.

Lifewise, I'm just a bit anxious about May 1st, when I participate in the NAMIWalks event: a 2.5 mile walk through a park in support of NAMI (I'm lazy, so I'm just going to post the link to NAMI's website for more information- www.NAMI.org). It'll keep NAMI functioning, which I'm all for.
It'll be 2.5 miles of me getting to know my teammates better and get a lot of thinking done. And if my sister says it's cool, I might take her camera to take pictures of the park. Should be nice.

There's my updates for the past two months, and now I have to get work done.

End of the Month Update

Well, I failed. I couldn't manage 50,000 words in one month.

In my defense, life hit hard and I started in the middle of the month.

I end January having written 16,000 words, bringing my novel's total to 73,000. I'm not so disappointed in myself for not making it, since I got some fairly good stuff written and I'm moving along in the story (A life-changing piece of information learned, oh no!). I would like to say February will be the month I finish this thing, as I shouldn't have that much longer to go, but I won't make it a definite; anything can happen in the next month, like, I don't know, me having to get a job to pay off some bills and finding myself too mentally drained at the end of each day to concentrate on words for a novel. Just putting it out there.

Nightmarish employment aside, I'm looking to February with a positive attitude. This novel will get done (the first novel I've completed in years, first novel over 60,000 words) by the end of the month, and then I can let it sit awhile before I get to do revisions...yay.

Winded...and Story Progress

Whew. It's been two days of writing a minimum of 1,700 words and has taken FOREVER to get through. Methinks I need to do a little more planning, which means I'll be carrying around that notebook in my purse and putting every spare second tomorrow at work in thinking about my story and where I want it to go next. I mean, I have a general idea of where they're going next, but just what is going to happen along the way, and what will happen when they get where they're going.

On the plus side, I did something I liked: I created a bit of tension and conflict between the Main Character and a Secondary Character. They're having a bit of a power-struggle. The Main Character is losing, and it's going to take a toll on her mentally...somehow. The tricky part will be continuing the struggle, dragging it out and making good use of it.

Here's hoping I figure something out tomorrow.