ROW80 2016 Round 4 Goals

A Round of Words in 80 Days
Round 4 2015

The writing challenge that
 knows you have a life

Back from an 11 month writing hiatus.  Got Life Hacked.  Outer chaos ginned up inner chaos and created a feedback loop.

The start of NaNo was the impetus I needed to jump back in.  I kinda knew if I ditched NaNo the fact of a first miss since 2004 would ditch my morale so that it might be months or years before I found the motivation again.

Because I jumped into NaNo Monday night, I decided I should also join ROW80 even tho its a month late for Round 4.  I need the motivation and accountability only a group can provide.  It also provides the incentive to keep going after November 30.

For my goals I'm going with what I set up for Round 1 in January (which I dropped out of before the end of the month) with a few tweaks for NaNo.


My Round 4 intentions: seek to regain my joy/Joy in writing and to prepare the soil for its blooming with these time investment goals:

• Storydreaming 15min Daily 
• Read/Study Craft 15min Daily 
• Move/Breathe/Meditate 15min Daily 
• Personal Journaling 15min Daily 
• Read Fiction 30min Daily 
• Blog post Writing/Editing. 15-60min Daily. (this is also a boundary.  60min max even if that means the post isn't ready to publish.  No more pressuring myself to post daily even if it means spending 2, 4, 6 hours and upwards getting it prepped.
• Social network activities 30min Daily (writing Joystory posts doesn't count only social reaching out like reading/commenting on other blogs, guest posts and posting to fb, twitter, pinterest etc)
• Fiddling in my Fiction Files.  30min Daily (includes editing WIP, outlining, character sketches, editing, adding/subtracting, and organizing info in WIP note files. 30min Daily
•  Scene Writing. 500 words or 30min Daily whichever comes first.  (for November that means my NaNo Novel, Living Hope.  And I will have to step it up if I hope to keep my NaNo winning streak.  But I know I can't come back from an 11mo writing hiatus and require myself to maintain a 1666 word pace.

Current Joy Meter: under 50% 

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NaNoWriMo 2016

NaNoWriMo 2016
Participant

I waited until the last minute to commit.  I've been on an unintentional writing hiatus since last January.  Well not zero writing but so little and so infrequent as to rank as negligible.  So the thought of a 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days challenge was nearly too intimidating to think about.  But the thought of missing my first NaNo since 2004 was too demoralizing.

Apparently morale trumped fear.  Or rather fear of a tanking morale trumped performance fear.

Two hours before the midnight kickoff I still had not settled on the story.  But then a fresh memory from earlier today when I entered the county courthouse to register to vote on the last possible day to do so here in Washington state, reminded me that this was a presidential election year and for the 2008 and 2012 election years my NaNo Novel was set in a mobile homes park named Hope Estates featuring residents whose lives were impacted by the 2008 economic bust with the election cycle running as a backdrop.

First Mobile Hopes then Occupy Hope and now Living Hope

Because the premise, setting and most of the characters are already established and the story's current events are dictated by our current events most of the prep work is already done.  That makes hope of actually winning again this year less laughable than it was yesterday at this time.

So off to the flying finger races.

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