May Is For Pressing Onward

I pretty much already stated by Write Motivation goals for May in my last post, but I figured I'd do something a little more official. Because, you know, I can.

Writing Goals for May

1. Finish rough draft of Grave of the Goddess
2. Take an honest break from writing Grave after sending it to beta readers
3. Write enough of Holyoak Five that I can start a queue for posting episodes every week
4. After at least a week's break, start revisions of Grave

I think all of that's pretty doable. I just hope I'm done with this rough draft in less than two weeks. My five year college reunion is coming up (I know, don't even talk to me) and one of my best friends in the world is coming to visit! I haven't seen her in... jeez... more than two years? We plan to have a personal reunion with my other best friend forever who is finishing up her first year of grad school as we speak.

I'm so excited!

And all of that aside, I'm also trying to press onward with the overhaul of our yard. Since we moved into the house at the end of last summer, we didn't do much in the way of yard work other than mowing the lawn a couple of time and trimming some of the more gregarious growth on the weeping cherry tree out front. Now every chance I get I'm out there with a rake and clippers, attacking the layers of dead leaves and tangled remnants of whatever someone planted years ago. There were tenants living in this house for a couple of years and I'm pretty positive they did ZERO yard work. I keep finding the strangest bits of plastic and trash in the strangest places... I shudder to think what I'll find when it gets really warm and I attack cleaning the basement.

One more thing before I go. I recently noticed that this little blog of mine turned five about a week and a half ago. I've been pretty terrible about posting here regularly up until this year, but I thought it was interesting that I started this my last semester of college and almost all of my posts have been about writing and reading and trying like hell to mesh my everyday life with love of those activities. There are some fun things in my archives.

That's all from me for now. I'm gonna go read up on other people's goals for the month and hope there are still some crazies like me trying to finish the ends of novels.

April Is For Winning!

Behold! My first Camp NaNoWriMo win!

I'm pretty proud of myself this month. Not only because I set myself a reasonable word count goal and met it, but because I took the opportunity to truly commit myself to writing. I have done little else for the past three weeks other than writing. (And cooking and cleaning - sort of.)

I also finished reading TEN books. Granted, two of them were comic strip collections, but still. It was a lot of reading.

Grave of the Goddess is officially over 100,000 words now. I am so very close to finishing it. My poor, bedraggled main characters have reached their final destination at last. Unfortunately, they're both about to experience a load of heartbreak, but that's how it goes. I am hoping with everything I know how to hope with that I will be finished with this draft in another 10k words. And then I can hand it over to my beta readers and relax with writing Holyoak Five while they tear Grave to pieces for me.

That was my month. Not much else happened to me. I've been pretty isolated what with not using Tumblr or Facebook. (That's right! I stayed true to my drastic goals and haven't used those at all.) But it's a productive kind of isolation. And it's such a relief to have the end of this draft in sight that I don't mind not having achieved much of anything else this month...


For the curious, here are the books I read this month broken into genres.

Young Adult (mostly fantasy):
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
Rebel Angels by Libba Bray
The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray
The Bitter Kingdom by Rae Carson

Middle Grade :
The Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

Non-fiction:
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Horror:
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
The Girl Who Love Tom Gordon by Stephen King

Comics:
The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
The Best of Foxtrot by Bill Amend



Bring on May! I'm ready for it.

April Write Motivation Goals

Hey, look at that. It's April 14th and I've haven't posted a thing about my goals for this month. Whoops!

My goals:

1. Do Camp NaNoWriMo with a word count goal of at least 27k for the month.
2. Finish rough draft of my WIP novel.
3. Keep posting weekly episodes of Holyoak Five.
4. Replace playing video games with reading books.

So the general plan for this month is to skyrocket into writing bliss based on all the good habits I started (fairly successfully) last month.

Progress so far:

Camp NaNoWriMo: Started out slow. Going much better after Saturday's Writeathon where I wrote 3k words. I'm currently sitting at just under 9k words for the month... Which is fine, it's all right, I can't complain. (Who am I going to complain to anyway? My boyfriend knows the drill by know. He just rolls his eyes and says, "Write, bitch!" Oh, I love him.) But I felt like the 27k goal was a minimum and am a teensy bit mad at myself for not being ahead of the curve.

Finish rough draft of Grave of the Goddess: My frustration with this as been at astronomical levels. I keep plugging away at it, but there's still so much left. In that vein, I have made some pretty drastic amendments to my daily schedule. I've got a list of about six "approved" activities I can participate in, and writing is number one. This has been going on since last Wednesday, and so far I've finished reading four books and written thousands of words. So... you know... I think it's going well!

Keep posting weekly episode of Holyoak Five: Falling behind. I'm about to go make an author's note post explaining that episodes might have to be biweekly now until I'm done with Grave. (I'm still writing it every day, but my concentration has definitely shifted to Grave.)

Replace video games with books: WOO! Totally, wildly successful. I'm catching up on my GoodReads challenge with a vengeance. Of course, it helps that I've cut out all tv/Netflix binging as well. (Other than Red Sox games, Game of Thrones, and the occasional Nature documentary in bed with the boy.)

So that's me so far this month. I have high hopes for finishing Grave soon at which point it goes out to beta reading, I start rewriting, and a lot of tears fall into every meal I consume for the next few months. You know how it goes.

Weekday Work Schedule

March is the month of being awesome, so I am trying to do a new thing every week in that vein. Last week I created my goals for the month and started in on all of them - with mixed success. But my overall effort pleased me (no burning out so far!) so I'm not going to detail the failures.

This week I am implementing a structured weekday work schedule. It's something I've tried in the past, but I always ended up taking a day where I said "fuck it" and spent the whole day watching TV and eating cereal straight from a box. Ugly, I know. But I think I've set myself up for a relatively painless segue into a structured workday this time because for the past month or so I've been good about working every day and - much more importantly - treating it like work.

("Work" has always motivated me. Ask any boss or teacher I've ever had; I was one of their best employees/students and they never had to wonder if I'd have something done on time or if they'd find me idly not working whenever they stopped by.)   

Here is the schedule I am striving to maintain, starting today:

Wake up at 0700 - doable since this is when the boy's alarm goes off.

0700 - 0800: Make breakfast (COFFEE) and read a book.

0800 - 0900: Blog stuff / social media stuff.

0900 - 1100: Work on Holyoak Five.

1100 - 1200: Pick something in the house to clean. (I use Unfuck Your Habitat for motivation and you should too.)

1200 - 1300: Make lunch and read some more of that book.

1300 - 1500: Work on current WIP novel. (For now, Grave of the Goddess.)

1500 until the boy gets home or until I'm done: Clean the kitchen.

Wish me luck! I'm confident in my abilities to focus, but I have the worst time forming habits. I have actually put an alarm into my phone for every single one of these time frames just to keep me on task. Or, you know, cause guilt if I'm backsliding.

How's everyone else in the Write Motivation community doing with their goals? This week I hope to start making the blog rounds during my social media hour in the morning to do some cheerleading. :)

On Being 27, and My Monthly Goals

Yesterday was my birthday. And now I'm 27. There is a funny thing about this age – and by funny, I mean morbid. Have you ever heard of the 27 club? By pure coincidence (I'm sure), several famous musicians have died at the age of 27. Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin… Just to name a few.

Okay, I don't actually think I'm going to die this year, but I am morbidly convinced that something awful is going to happen to me or someone I love. Is that stupid? Maybe, but it's there. I've been obsessed with the idea of the 27 club for a long time; I'm even writing a book about it - A Hunter's Fire.

At any rate, I think 27 is going to be much better than 26. On a superficial level, I like odd numbers better than even numbers. Also, the number seven has always been kind to me. Both 17 and 7 were wonderful ages for me. Not to mention, I still have three years to go until the dreaded 30. So that's not too bad.

Enough of that. Let's talk about writing.

January was a total wash in terms of writing. I was supposed to be finishing Grave of the Goddess, but I barely got anything done on it. February was much better: I started writing Holyoak Five, and that has been going swimmingly. (If you haven't read this story blog yet, please consider checking it out. Link is below, or in my sidebar.)

I want March to be my month of Awesome. Because I'm still unemployed, I'm able to be extraordinarily productive in terms of my writing. I want to take advantage of that for as long as I possibly can. So in that vein, let's take a look at my goals for this month.

MARCH GOALS
 1 - Participate in Write Motivation
2 - Blog post about writing once a week
3 - Booking Through Thursday post once a week
4 - Post an episode of Holyoak Five every Friday
5 - Finish reading at least 4 books (in an effort to catch up to my Goodreads challenge)
6 - See note.

Note! I posted on Write Motivation that I wanted to catch up on my backlog of critiques for Grave of the Goddess's first chapter, BUT I think it's far more important to just finish the rough draft before I start in on the rewrite. I was hanging with my boys yesterday, and they agreed with me about this. So I'm adding a goal of ~500 words a day of work on GotG for March.

All right. Wow, if you stuck around through all that, thanks. My final note is this: I followed everyone from the Write Motivation roll call sheet on Twitter and by blog, and I'm hoping to participate a good deal in a community of motivated writers. Here's to making friends and enjoying the community spirit.

Hopefully next time I'll have something more interesting to say. This post made me feel wicked self-conscious. o.0