Final ROW80 round 1 check-in

This week's progress

1. I added to "Zombie," one of the five short stories I was trying to finish this round.
2. I put the finishing touches on "Unborn," which means I managed to finish one of five stories. I'm trying to make myself feel better about falling so far short of my goal by reminding myself that: a) I only had two stories started when this round began, but now I have five, and one of them is finished; and b) I try to do too much.
3. I finished writing and editing my next article for VoiceCatcher. It's about memoir writer, teacher, and traveler Robin Schauffler, whose piece "High Priest" was published in the Fall 2012 issue. The article should be up on the VoiceCatcher website on Monday, April 15th.
4. I wrote this blog post about the potential to get actionable data from rubrics for my friend/former co-worker Kim Leonard's actionable data blog.
5. I wrote a speculative fiction poem for the World's End series on Josh Hewitt's blog. Feeling very happy with how it turned out...though I reserve the right to change my mind and hate it later. When the poem goes up, I'll link to it from this blog.
6. As part of my ongoing efforts to get more involved in the local lit scene, I went to two community writing events this week, Art Spark (co-hosted this month by The Attic Institute) and the VoiceCatcher kick-off reading at the Multnomah County Library.
7. I started putting together an application for The Attic Institute's Hawthorne Fellows program, next session starting April 1, and then realized that would be trying to do too much. Also I'm broke.
8. I made some progress on my pseudonym's current WIP (more on this in the next section, under "I try to do too much").
9. Today I wrote a poem called "On Crying"--which I may end up putting up on my World Citizen blog--and parts of two other poems. I've been in a funk today. Being in a funk makes me want to write poetry.

Carrie Padian article published

Just a quick note this morning to announce that the VoiceCatcher article about Carrie Padian is up today. Yay!

Click here to read "The Heart Part: An Interview with Carrie Padian."

ROW80 check-in 10

Gack! One week left of this round of ROW80! =*o

My progress this week:

• As I write this post, I'm about 30-60 minutes of writing time away from a first draft of my next VoiceCatcher article, which is due to my editor tomorrow.
• I've started writing the poem for Josh Hewitt.
• I've started drafting the blog post on rubrics for my friend Kim.
• I've talked to a few people about "Unborn" and have some ideas for revising it.
• I began brainstorming my goals for ROW80 round 2 (starting April 1).

That's about it. Well, related to writing, that is. I mean, I could tell you about grocery shopping and getting new brakes and stuff like that, but that's not really what we're here for, is it?

A couple things I did prior to this week but had forgotten to mention:

• Two Thursdays ago I went to a reading at Rain or Shine and heard three middle school students and their two writing group facilitators read. What struck me most was how clearly influenced the young writers are by what they usually read. I thought it was pretty neat.
• A week ago today I attended a reading at Stonehenge Studios, where I ran into Willa Schneberg, about whom I wrote this article, and where fell in love with the poetry of Jodie Marion, who read from her chapbook Another Exile on the 45th Parallel and who also happens to have three poems in the Winter 2013 issue of VoiceCatcher.

I only mention attending these readings because one of my goals moving forward is to become more involved in the local writing community, and one of the ways to do that is to attend readings like this. Plus, okay, I'm going to be reading at Rain or Shine in May, and I figure my third reading will probably happen at Stonehenge via the open mic they offer at each month's poetry reading. But I get all hot-flashy and stomach-twisty when I think about that, so let's not dwell on it.

ROW80 check-in 9

Measurable progress! This week I wrote a first draft of a new story.

The new story, in fact, is the prose poem about the woman whose baby refuses to be born. While the idea came to me last week, I didn't draft it until yesterday, when I realized that I could write it as a flash fiction piece rather than a prose poem and count it as my fifth story. So you see my Muse did help me with my ROW80 goal last week after all. It just took me a while to realize what she'd given me. (Now I feel like I owe her an apology...)

And while I was in the business of thinking of things in a new light, I realized that the speculative fiction poem I'm writing for Josh Hewitt could also possibly count toward this round's goal because it's a cross-genre work. But in the end I think it's going to be a line poem and not so much tell a story as explore a frame of mind.

ROW80 check-ins 7 & 8

Wait. Where are we? Oh yes. That's right. In Week 9 already of this round of ROW80. My, how time flies.

Over the last couple of weeks my Muse has visited me with:

• A flash fiction piece for my pseudonym
• A new little chunk for a creative non-fiction piece I've been working on for several months (and had thought was finished, actually)
• A description of an explosion (part of a fiction piece that has yet to manifest itself)
• Two lines of poetry
• A prose poem about a woman whose baby refuses to be born
• Ideas for a couple of articles on romance/romantic relationships that I haven't even touched because when they came to me I was in the process of writing something else

None of these, of course, have anything to do with my ROW80 goals or any of the projects I already had in the works. Tricky, tricky Muse.

But because I actually do want to finish some projects already underway and accomplish my ROW80 and Fail Club goals, I also spent some time last week revisiting those goals and figuring out how to accomplish them in the time I have left.