Friday Forays in Fiction: ROW80 Round 3 Intent & Goals

A Round of Words in 80 Days
The writing challenge that knows you have a life

The third round of the year starts Monday when there will be an official 'state your goals' post at the hub. The first check-in will be on Wednesday. This week we are to state our intent to participate by dropping our link at the ROW80 hub in the linky at this post.

You can if you like go ahead and create your goals post and link to it both now and on Monday.

I'm going to make this my goals post but not link to it at the hub until Monday.

My goals will be very similar to what they were in Round 2 which I joined half-way through.  And like last time I will continue to copy/paste the goals list with new commentary for each check-in.  But I am going to strip the goal list from the last round of nearly all of the commentary added during the round leaving only what effects the new goals.  I will also be adding some new goals.

LESSONS LEARNED LAST ROUND:

Miracles seem to happen when attention is paid to something.

Attention =Attend = serving as well as being in service to


Changing habits in just one area has ripple effects across all other habits.  It is powerful and empowering to realize that if you just take small steps in the right direction BIG things start to happen.


THE GOALS:

1. Choose 1 of the finished short stories to be the first ebook to publish on Smashwords or Amazon and prep it for take off by the end of June August:

• revision
• line edit
• format
• convert  

___[Blow Me a Candy Kiss  part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4; part 5;] -  
05-12-2012 Yes on choosing the title.  This story is set in my Fruits of the Spirit story world and aspires to be literary.  It has elements of romance in it but that is not the primary focus since the couple involved are already married.  The focus is on loss and grief over infertility and the death of a child/sibling.  Aprox 6000 words.

___Still have not started re-reading it.  It's been over a month since I set this goal and prioritized it at the top of the four goals as I began the last round and yet I've still not started re-reading it.  That looks a lot like the RESISTANCE discussed in Pressfield's War of Art.  So I'm tempted to explore that but I sense Pressfield would call that RESISTANCE too--just another way to avoid DOING.  Besides, according to Pressfield, RESISTANCE is always about fear.  What more do I need to know?  At least before I begin.

Decided early in the last round I needed fresh eyes so set new goal:

Find beta readers outside of current circle of close family and friends.
___Not yet accomplished.  I confess I'm not sure how to go about finding/asking for beta readers


My sister Jamie and my Mom both re-read Candy Kiss while I was at my mom's in May and Mom read my entire portfolio of hard copy stories and snippets and poems.  But that isn't what I need at this point.

The binder Mom read which I call my portfolio contains all of my complete short stories and a number of scenes pulled out of WIP that I deemed worth wasting ink and paper on. There is another attitude steeped in my pesky perfectionism that I need to change and I would have put printing hard copy of all my WIP including the NaNo Novels on this goal list except that my printer is not working.

Camp NaNoWriMmo 2012

___ I intend to join the August Camp NaNoWriMo


WriMos Word Count:___


The Time Investment Goals:


2. [New Goal for Round 3] Return to some form of free writing exercise like doodling, morning pages or journaling for 30 minutes daily. A practice I once had that fell away when I began daily blogging which I confess is no substitute and if I cannot keep the very personal free write/journaling up in tandem with daily blogging then the blogging needs to give.  The purpose of this free writing is to develop playfulness analogous to a jazz musicians playfulness with musical tools, vocabulary and grammar.  I've been reading Imagine: How Creativity Works by  Jonah Lehrer which reminded me of the importance of play in creativity.


3. [New Goal for Round 3] MOVE!! 15 minute per day minimum: walk, mini-tramp, pace the house with weights on legs, exercise ball, exercise elastic bands, dance/sway to music.  ANYTHING counts as I've gotten so sedentary which I've re-learned recently has very negative impact on creativity and energy.  It doesn't have to be VIGOROUS yet.  Maybe later after the daily habit is established I'll add that requirement for 3 days per week and up the 15 minutes to 30.


4. Spend 30 minutes or more per day reading a book or quality web article on Writing or Publishing or work habit/organization from my ever growing TBR of books and/or blogs or websites with professional level content on those subjects.  Will compile list for future updates.  (hmm no list yet)
  



5. Spend 30 minutes or more per day daydreaming in the story world with pencil and pad at hand. 

This was the habit that really took during the last round and yielded astonishing things.  Late in the round I added a new goal related to this one: to develop the habit of keeping the note taking implements with me at all times because as the habit of dreaming the stories developed it didn't always confine itself to when I was near my netbook or crochet where the means to record them were available.  Developing the means is a bit tricky for some cases but I'm working on it.

6. Spend 30 minutes or more per day on one or more of the tasks in the list below:

[as the round progresses check-in updates will accumulate in this spot which will push the list itself down]

• Input any material from the daydreaming session into it's appropriate file or task list.  ___  this is a developing habit begun during last round
• Clean up the Fruit of the Spirit storyworld worksheet.  ___  this is where most of the dabbling for last round occurred.   
• Create a master task list in FOS story world worksheet file and add any actionable task that comes to mind while working with the files: research and fact check, character development, scenes needed etc.  Future goals can be taken from this list.  ___ the master task list was created soon after I started the last round but using it is a developing habit  
• Create topic pages in the FOS story world worksheet file for every character from every existing story and novel finished or in progress that is set in this story world. Add any of the characters known life events to the master timeline. ___ have added a few and added info to existing ones as well. Much of my file dabbling occurred in these character notes
• New task --06-11-2012 : collect character info for all the Faye's Strays from out of all the stories and files they are scattered through into it's own section in the FOS worksheet file.   ___ this is where the work mentioned in the line above was happening during last round
• Re-read the incomplete short story Home Is Where the Horror Is and consider returning to work on it with an eye toward finishing it this summer.  This is one of the Faye's Strays stories so work on it will count toward the WriMos word count.   ___ have not reread nor written new scenes yet but have jotted many ideas for the the missing scenes, did some new character sketch work some of which I may count towards the WriMos which end tomorrow
• Do a line edit of all of the completed short stories

• Blow Me a Candy Kiss
• How Does Your Garden Grow
• Running In Circles
• Of Cats and Claws and Curiosities
• Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes

• During the line edits consider whether any significant revision is still needed--scenes to add or delete, rearrange or rewrite; timeline issues, facts to confirm or to change--and create an actionable task topic in the file.   ___ am using the master task list in the storyworld file mentioned above and then linking to the appropriate story file.  This is what I love about WhizFolders as my story writing ap.
• Choose 10 POV level characters from FOS and write a first person rambling monologue for them. 
• Write fresh scenes whenever a spark is lit by any of the work on this list or the daydreaming or reading.
• Clean up the 8 NaNo novel files: quarantine the mess, create work space for new writing, and create a system for  storing the material salvaged from the mess in such a way as it can be found when needed. i.e. linking it to appropriate topic pages in the FOS story world worksheet.

• ____ The Substance of Things Hoped For 2009
• ____ Mobile Hopes 2008
• ____ Storyteller's Spouse 2006
• ____ Spring Fever 2007
• ____ Brooding Instinct 2005
• ____ Majoring in Marine Biology 2004
• ____ Everything That Rises Must Submerge 2010
• ____ A Trick of Light 2011

• Read and notate the scene text of the 8 NaNo novel files 

• ____ The Substance of Things Hoped For 2009 
• ____ Mobile Hopes 2008
• ____ Storyteller's Spouse 2006 
• ____ Spring Fever 2007
• ____ Brooding Instinct 2005 
• ____ Majoring in Marine Biology 2004
• ____ Everything That Rises Must Submerge 2010
• ____ A Trick of Light 2011 

Some of the work of these last two tasks can be done concurrently so I was tempted to collapse them under one task and have just one list of the WIP but they are very different tasks when you look close with this last one being more about the writing and the other about information organizing and story outlining.  I could conceivably do the work of one task with one novel while doing the work of the other with a different one.  The two tasks require different frames of mind.