53rd ROW80 Check-In

A Round of Words in 80 Days
Round 4 2012
The writing challenge that knows you have a life

I'm doing things quite differently this round.  Since I joined mid Round 2 this year I have been using a blog-within-a-blog format for these check-in posts with updates stacked atop previous updates and commentary added under each goals section including a string of Ns and Ys for the five time investment goals.  This got quite unwieldy by mid round.

So now I've created a Google Doc Spreadsheet to keep track of the Ns and Ys and have set up a ROW80 page to feature the goals sans commentary.  These check-in posts will now contain only the commentary relating to the previous half week, a screenshot of the relevant lines on the spreadsheet and link to the spreadsheet and goals page.  And as of October 23 the READ CRAFT reading lists.


READ CRAFT:

Currently Reading

What to Do When There's Too Much to Do by Laura Stack (Part of my attempt to organize my life around my priorities. So part of my ROW80 reading list)
Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One and Never Lets Go by Les Edgerton
Write Good or Die! edited by Scott Nicholson (a collection of essays by inde authors.  many of them self-published)  
The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler
What Matters in Jane Austen? by John Muller
Trust the Process: An Artist's Guide to Letting Go by Shaun McNiff


Recently Read:

A Cheap and Easy Guide to Self-publishing eBooks by Tom Hua read this online
Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Leher
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg  Just finished this last month and wrote an overview of it for that next check-in along with my musings on how to apply what I learned..  This is where I've been getting the most help with learning how to recognize a habit, determine if it is desirable and if so maximize it but if not change it.


In a recent Check-In I implemented a NEW GOAL:  before heading to bed, close all aps but the one I've chosen for free writing and when the time slated for that is up segue directly to working with the fiction files.

I established it after digesting the info in Duhigg's The Power of Habit and have followed through since the Sunday before November 1st now. See the nice new strings of Ys in the two relevant columns?

See my musings in this check-in post about my several encounters recently with the principle that clarity isn't arrived at through thought alone but via action--engagement in the non-abstract realm with the minutia, manipulation of the materials, or in other words 'just doing it' and how I'm attempting to apply it to my stalled out stories.

View the spreadsheet Google Doc directly
View the goals list

Joy Renee @ NaNoWriMo

I now have a 9th NaNo mess to add to the others over on the goals list.  I can't bear to go look at it again yet.  But thanks to the ROW80 goals I will a lot sooner than in previous years.

I gave myself permission for a few days break from the fiction files to catch up on sleep, chores and the Secret Santa crochet project that will now need more than 4 hours per day invested in it over the next three weeks.  I'm afraid it is actually more than 6 hours per day.

Lucky for my stories tho and thanks to ROW80 I've now so tightly coupled crochet with dreaming the story world I find it hard to do one without the other so my fiction files will benefit anyway I just may not be inputting the hand notes in to the electronic files until after Christmas.

But who knows.  Maybe the momentum of November will pay dividends.  I imagine at the very least the freewrite now beginning each day's session on the netbook will continue to produce words that will need to be moved over to the fiction files eventually.