ROW80 Goals - Round 1

With the beginning of A Round of Words in 80 Days looming, I figured I should probably pull my thumb out and set myself some goals for the first round.

As I mentioned in my previous post, me setting goals often tends to be a fruitless exercise. Mainly because (I think), I get a bit optimistic about my capabilities, so I set goals that aren't really achievable (this happens not just in writing but in life in general). As soon as I become aware that I'm not going to make it, I start procrastinating for all I'm worth (and you know what they say about procrastination...).

So, for ROW80, I have thought more carefully about my goal-setting than I usually do, because I want it to be something I can actually accomplish. Not only so I will actually have something to show for it, but so I don't end up with that all-too-familiar feeling of failure and worthlessness. Therefore, my goals for ROW80 Round 1 are as follows:

Major Goal
*To complete Part 1 of Dark and Silent Waters, my novella, ie. The first four chapters (not including the prologue, which is already complete).

Minor Goals
*To complete one chapter every fortnight.
*To workshop at least one, hopefully two of these chapters among my writing group.
*To edit/polish Part 1.

To see what goals other ROW80 participants have posted, click here.

Of Writing and Workshopping

Last Saturday we had the first meeting of my new writing workshop group.

The proposal for the group came from one of my fellow writers from TAFE, who said she had been feeling disconnected from the writing community since leaving the course. During the meeting, it became obvious that this was a sentiment shared by all of us; we missed the face-to-face feedback and critiquing, the immediacy of sharing our writing with other people in the same room.

At TAFE, having daily classes meant that we had constant deadlines imposed on us. As much as we complained about being forced to submit poems and short stories, novels and screenplays, the fact that we had to have something to workshop most weeks meant that we were always writing. In the three years since the writing course ended, however, many of us have become a bit slack as far as writing goes - at least, I know I have. I'd set goals for myself and then uni or work or life would get in the way, and I'd just sort of shrug and say "I'll do it next month". Though I did get a bit of my novella done during NaNoWriMo this year, I haven't written nearly as much as I should have. And I pretty much haven't touched my fantasy trilogy since TAFE.

It felt good to be in a room full of writers again. Even though we weren't actually workshopping, it felt as though just talking about the writing and critiquing process was enough to stir my need to create. We now have others to hold us accountable; if we say we want to have a piece done by a given time, the other group members can give us the proverbial kick in the pants we need to reach that goal. The group we've thrown together is full of good writers and workshoppers, so I'm looking forward to seeing what influence it has on my own writing. I'm hoping that with other writers constantly reading and critiquing my work and giving me feedback, it will improve not only the quantity but also the quality of what I write. Maybe, just maybe, it will make the difference between having a few random chapters of a manuscript and having a completed novella ready to publish.

Between writing and doing Honours for IT/Multimedia, it looks like I have an interesting (if hectic) year ahead.

And because it's Christmas, here's a picture of my dog asleep under the Christmas tree:

A Round of Words in 80 Days

With the hectic rush of NaNoWriMo over, I was putting off writing by trawling the writing forums, when I stumbled across a link to this site:

A Round of Words in 80 Days

The site was started by a NaNoWriMo participant who, like many others, found it impossible to disconnect completely from their real life in order to meet the requirements of NaNoWriMo. It is another writing challenge, similar to NaNoWriMo, but instead of having only 30 days to complete the challenge, you have 80. Also, instead of having to churn out 50,000 words, writers can set their own goals they wish to achieve. Writers sign in using their blogs, and throughout the challenges keep participants updated on their progress, as well as encouraging others to reach their goals.
Many people feel that writing 50,000 words in a month is just too big a task (in a way, I empathise - I reached 50,000 but only by madly bashing out senseless drivel to fill that Word document). However, sometimes writers need something to push us to keep writing, a deadline, a reward, a supportive community; anything. We need something to get us into our chair in front of our keyboard, without being intimidated by it. A Round of Words in 80 Days should get us there (kind of like bribing a kid with chocolate to clean their room... hmm... now I want chocolate...). It's a challenge that WE choose, so we know we can win :)
I've joined; hope to see some of you there!

NaNoWriMo - The Aftermath

So, it's now December. Not only does that mean we are now officially in the Christmas month (do I hear a collective cry of dismay from my fellow retail workers? Oh yes), it also means that NaNoWriMo has come to an end.
I remember saying at the start of November that I doubted I would get to 50,000 words but that I was sure I'd end up with at least a completed draft of my novella. As it turns out, I did get 50,000 words... but no finished draft. While some scenes seemed to flow through my mind like movies (to the point where I rambled on excessively for the sake of word count), there were other parts of my story that just did not want to be written yet.
Unlike some other writers I know who finished days early, I was a leave-it-til-the-last-minute type. I hit 50,000 words with only 20 minutes before the midnight deadline. And 25,000 or so of those words were written in the last three days of NaNoWriMo.
Because of academic commitments, I didn't really get to start working on NaNoWriMo until the middle of the month, which put me at an immediate disadvantage. And when I finally did get to start working on it, my inner editor just would not leave me alone.
Those of you who know me are aware that I'm a bit of a grammar Nazi, so you can imagine how I felt about allowing myself to write absolute rubbish. Every unedited word I left behind, every incoherent sentence I typed made me die a little inside. Through the early and middle parts of the month, I was still writing as I normally do; write a paragraph, check it, write a few more, check those, finish the chapter, check it, check it again, make people read it and provide feedback, rewrite. As a result, my progress was quite slow. On November 28, I realised that I wouldn't get anywhere near 50,000 if I kept going that way, so I shoved my inner editor into a cage and threw away the key (I threw it somewhere I could easily find it in December though hehe).
Most of what I wrote for NaNoWriMo was absolute garbage. Of my 50,000 words, only about 15,000 or so are worth keeping. But that is more than double what I had when I started, so it's still quite an achievement. I have about four chapters more or less complete now, plus fragments of most of the other thirteen chapters, so I have a more solid foundation to keep building on throughout December; since I didn't make it for November, I'm aiming to have a draft completed by New Year.
In closing, I'd like to congratulate all those NaNoWriMos who reached their 50,000 words. And to those who didn't, well done for trying; it was a huge challenge :)

Why Writers Should Not Be Allowed Out In Public

I started out tonight by trying to work on my novella, but a combination of too much sugar and too little sleep have resulted in nothing but pages of incoherent rambling. So I thought I'd share a little anecdote instead.

Most people who know me know that I work in the clothing section of a large retail store. Tonight I was running around the footwear department, madly trying to tidy it up, and while I was working, my brain was thinking about my novella, and about where a major confrontation between the protagonist and the antagonist should take place. Half way through this train of thought, a customer ran up and hurriedly asked me a question before I had properly registered her presence. As a result, the conversation turned out as follows:

Customer: 'Scuse me, can you tell me where I can find the shoe polish?
Me: The Underworld?
Customer: ... What?
Me: *awkward, vacant pause* What? Oh. Um... Yeah, sorry, two aisles that way.

Luckily the customer had a sense of humour (after she got what she wanted, she came past again and said "Got my shoe polish, had to fight Hades for it though."), but it made me wonder if perhaps my preoccupation with Dark and Silent Waters had become a little unhealthy. Oh well... I'm sure it won't be the last time I make a fool of myself for the sake of my craft :D

Has anyone else out there had an experience where they had difficulty separating fiction from reality?

Hey, Doc, I Got A Bad Case Of Adjectivitis...

Just a quick post to share a blog post by Michael Pryor, author of (among other things) young adult fantasy series The Laws of Magic.

Writing Disease by Michael Pryor

To this list I would like to add Expositionitis: The tendency to dump dull/irrelevant information on the poor unsuspecting reader, resulting in hideous slabs of exposition lurking between otherwise reasonable paragraphs of prose.

I know that I have suffered from most of these on more than one occasion, and I'm sure most of my other fellow writers will empathise :) I think we need to get these recognised as official medical conditions. That way us writers can use them to take time off work/uni etc to work on our novels :D

Staring into Dark and Silent Waters...

I'm taking a short break from writing my novella (I just hit 6,000 words for NaNoWriMo :D), and I thought I'd post a link to the song that basically inspired the whole story:

Shallow Waters - Amberian Dawn

As I've mentioned (I think) in an earlier post, I was muddling away with my fantasy trilogy at the start of the year when I chanced upon this song on YouTube. In creative terms, listening to it was like being hit with a bomb. With the lyrics telling an engaging story and the music setting a dark and depressing mood, my brain filled with images and ideas the same way the Titanic filled with water after it crashed into that iceberg (although luckily my brain didn't sink into the Atlantic ocean, killing around 1,500 people). The world and characters came to life in my mind, growing and changing until it was like a movie playing in my head.

The song may not be to everyone's tastes, but I'm sure that those who have read bits of my novella so far will see how I made the connections (and yes, my novella's title was pilfered from the lyrics).

Out of curiosity, has anyone else ever had a moment where a song/TV show/whatever inspires them to write to the point where they can't step away from the keyboard?

Anyhoo, back to writing I go :)