ROW80 check-in 2

I have very little to report this week regarding my writing progress because I've been laid up with the flu since Tuesday and have done very little except sleep. And now that I'm feeling better, I'm scrambling to catch up on an editing project.

However, my being sick did give me an idea for a story. This new story is more magical realism than speculative fiction, and it has nothing to do with the theme of "conformity," which I'd hoped all five of my stories would relate to. But hey -- it's fiction, it's an idea for a short story, and I'll take it and count it as one of my five.

So I guess I did make some progress this week. I may not have written, but I got an idea for a story, and that's worth something.

A letter to my Muse

Dear Muse,

Help me out here a little, please. Work with me. You are a mischievous Muse: you come to me in the shower or while I'm driving or on a walk when you know damned well I can't write anything down. And yet when I'm sitting here during my scheduled writing time you hide from me. All those awesome ideas you brought while I was unavailable to write have fled from my head and I'm stuck with a blank page and a feeling like it's all there just out of reach, if only I could figure out how to get to it.

I don't want to dominate you, Muse, but neither do I want to be dominated by you. What would it look like to partner with you around writing? To have a balanced and healthy relationship with you?

ROW80 check-in

This week I managed to write 1,853 words of a new speculative fiction story about a woman who has to choose the future reality of her society. This is short of my goal by 1,147 words...but we can call it "warming up," right?

I did have a realization though that I want to adjust my goal a bit for a couple of reasons. I had said I was going five new speculative fiction stories of 3,000-5,000 words, one story drafted per week for the first five weeks.

First, I'm taking off the word count goal. I don't care how many words my short stories are. Some may be longer and some shorter; the point is to have a finished story.

Second, I realized that it might be more effective (i.e. less boring) to work on more than one story per week rather than trying to write a draft of an entire story in one week. That way I can work on one story until I get stuck and then move onto a different story and make some progress there, and eventually (in theory) chip away at all five until they're done.

Still want to finish a first draft of five short stories in five weeks though. That's still a goal. And I'm sticking with the speculative fiction theme.

In related-but-slightly-different news, I attended a meeting of Failure Club tonight, an idea started by my friend George. The point of Failure Club is to set big goals and embrace failure as an inevitable part of success. My Failure Club goals this year are: sell 500 copies of a book, get five pieces accepted for publication by literary journals/magazines, and do three public readings. The way this fits into Failure Club: I'm sure I'll try many strategies for selling 500 books, some of which will fail; I'm sure I'll receive lots of rejections before I get my acceptances; and I may chicken out about the public readings (though I already have one scheduled in April--eek!).

How about you? What did you work on this week?

Willa Schneberg article published

As you may recall from my blog post "On working with an editor," in November and December I interviewed and wrote an article about Portland poet, ceramic artist, photographer and psychotherapist Willa Schneberg for VoiceCatcher, a local org dedicated to supporting women artists and writers in the Portland/Vancouver area.

The article is finally published! Click here to read "Capturing the Essence of Things: A Conversation with Willa Schneberg."

On (not) writing every day: an emerging process

One of the consistent pieces of advice for writers that I've found on writing blogs and in books about writing is this: Write every day.

God that sounds exhausting. I mean, when I was in that creative non-fiction class last spring, I took my notebook to bed with me every night and jotted down notes or freewrote by hand for 30-60 minutes. (And actually that led to jotting down notes all throughout the day, because once that tap was opened the words just kept flowing, like people streaming into Target on Black Friday...because it was really about validating those little thoughts when I had them, and once I began doing that, more thoughts/ideas rushed in to be validated.) I'd take the notebook to bed with me every night, but it was only once a week that I'd sit down with that notebook and my laptop and start constructing a creative non-fiction piece by throwing all the bits and pieces that seemed to go together into a Word doc, adding some stuff to make it flow better, and then calling it a draft.

I took notes every day, but I only really wrote once a week. Writing feels different from jotting down random thoughts. Writing is the act of trying to construct a coherent piece. An actual draft of something rather than a smattering of only-possibly-related ideas and images. At least, that's what feels like writing to me.

But the thing is that once the class was over, I stopped taking that notebook to bed with me every night. Once I no longer had external motivation (an assignment), my newly-formed habit fell to the wayside. I tried it a few times, but nothing came.

A Round of Words in 80 Days: My Goals

As I mentioned in my last post, I find it helpful to get involved in various writing communities and set specific goals/assignments to keep me accountable and on-track. And...well...just to keep me writing at all. Evidently I'm a poster child for behavioral learning theory, which states, in essence, that a person will learn/do if the external environment is set up in such a way as to be motivating--reward desired behavior, punish undesired behavior--which of course is where you get piano teachers slapping students' hands with rulers when mistakes are made and the dunce cap in old-school classrooms.

All tangents aside for the moment, a Twitter connection recently turned me on to A Round of Words in 80 Days. Rules can be read on the site, so I won't bore you by repeating them here. But the main point is that I need some goals for this. Some measurable and achievable goals. (Learning assessment training, don't fail me now!)