**********
I just realized I didn't post my final word count here! My 2007 NaNoWriMo novel Jesus Loves Even Me (my fourth NaNo novel) was finished at 50,609 words - yay!
**********
Saturday, December 29, 2007
My final word count for NaNo 2007!
**********
I just realized I didn't post my final word count here! My 2007 NaNoWriMo novel Jesus Loves Even Me (my fourth NaNo novel) was finished at 50,609 words - yay!
**********
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Word count for Saturday, 11-17-07
Today's word count is 3,953, making my current word count
The novel is 81% complete, and there are only 9,503 words to go!! Woo hoo!
My current word count...
My current word count is
meaning that the novel is 73% complete! Only 13,456 words to go!
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Word count for Sunday, 11-11-07
Today's word count was 3,785, bringing the total so far to
That means that the novel is 45% done, with 27,675 words to go!
Word count for Saturday, 11-10-07
Saturday's word count was 3,973, bringing my total to
That means that my NaNo novel is 37% done. I have just 31,460 words to go!
Friday, November 09, 2007
Word count for Friday, 11-9-07
Today's word count was 3,357 for a total of 14,567. That means I'm 29% done, with 35,433 words to go!
Word count for Thursday, 11-8-07
Today's word count is 7,667, bringing my total for the past two days to 11,210! I'm 22% done, and I have 38,790 words to go!
Keep typing!
Keep typing!
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Started the 2007 NaNoWriMo...
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Yes, I'm a little late getting started (six days, to be exact), but I'd decided just before NaNoWriMo started that I wouldn't be participating this year. Today, I discovered an idea to 'fix' a story line that needed it, and so I was ready to NaNo.
Today's word count: 3,543 (7% done, only 46,457 words to go!)
(image from sxc.hu)
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Be a writer who writes...
This is a great article about being a writer who writes. (I don't know some of the people this article mentions. I'm not recommending the writing or products of any author mentioned, but the article itself is very good.)
How to Become a Writer Who Writes
by Judy Reeves
Gertrude Stein wrote, “To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.” Who can say what she meant (she also wrote, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”), except perhaps exactly what she wrote: that writing is all and everything of it, the beginning and the end. That to write is to write. We just do it. How to get started writing? Write. How to keep going? Write.
Sadly, for many of us it just isn’t that simple. We have trouble getting started, we have trouble keeping the pace and, too often, we simply give up or our enthusiasm and determination trickle away, like a stream petering out.
But because writing is in our hearts and souls and DNA, after a few weeks or months or even years, we’re back at it again. More determined than ever that, this time, we’ll stay with it.
Maybe we do and maybe we don’t. In my experience as a teacher, more often than not people don’t stay with it. For some, the cycle repeats and repeats. Because we can’t keep the thing going, we begin to judge ourselves failures at writing, our self-esteem goes the way of our tossed out pages, and after a while, it becomes more and more difficult to begin again. This is heartbreaking. Because we are writers and when we aren’t being fully and wholly ourselves — when a piece of ourselves is missing — we can never feel at home in the world or at peace within ourselves. Writing is who we are. Not all of who we are, but enough of who we are that when we’re not writing, we’re not whole.
Claim Yourself As Writer
Until you name yourself Writer, you will never be a writer who writes (and keeps writing).
Most writers I know, especially those who have not published, say, “I want to be a writer.” Or “I’m a [fill in the blank] and I like to write.” Or “I’ve always dreamed of being a writer.” But they don’t actually call themselves a writer. Think of all the other names you give yourself: man/woman, mother/father, wife/husband, friend, teacher, technician, masseuse, lawyer, gardener, chef. We take each of these names as a way of identifying ourselves, both to others and to ourselves. We are what we say we are. In some cultures, new names are assumed when character-evolving events take place. These names indicate the person has been transformed. If you announce you are a writer, rather than simply mouthing that you want to be or you’d like to be, you may be transformed. Try it. Right now. Speak your name out loud followed by, “I’m a writer.” Let yourself experience the sensations you feel when you sound out the words. “But I haven’t been published yet,” you might say, as if this were the thing that would give you the right to call yourself writer. After all, when you tell people you’re a writer, don’t they always ask, “Oh, and what have you published?”
Listen to this: Being published doesn’t have anything to do with being a writer! It has to do with earning money as a writer. Maybe. Getting some kind of validation and recognition, perhaps notoriety and fame. Though truth be told, the majority of published writers don’t earn all that much money or notoriety or fame. We might say, to be published is to be published is to be published. To be sure, getting published is the aim of many of us. After all, we write to communicate, and having an audience is the flip side of the communication coin. But it is not the reason we write. We write because it is what we must do. Anne Sexton said, “When I am writing I am doing the thing I was meant to do.”
Besides, once we are published, this doesn’t mean we will stop writing. We will continue to write. This is what writers do. I have this vision of me at my writing table, a fat roll of butcher’s paper at one end and a take-up reel with a crank at the other end. The paper just keeps passing beneath my pen and I just keep writing. As the old joke goes, “Old writers never die, they just keep revising the ending.”
How do you claim yourself as writer?
First, say it. “I’m a writer.” Say it out loud. Say it to yourself in the mirror. Say it to your friends and family. Say it to the next person you meet at a party who asks, “What do you do?” Say it to a stranger in line at the grocery store. Say it to your mother. Mostly, say it to yourself. “I’m a writer.”
· Make a place for your writing, a sacred place where you go with joy as your companion, not dread or guilt or “shoulds” riding your shoulders like weights of sand. If you don’t already have a room or specific place, make one. Take up a whole room or a section of a room. Before she created her own studio, my friend Wendy used a screen to separate her writing place from the rest of the living room. If the only space you can free up for your writing is part of a table, sometimes, when you’re not eating on it, then make it a special place. When you go there for your writing, bring along a candle or lamp or some flowers, anything that transforms the space from the quotidian to the unique. Make it important and make it yours however you can. Claim the space.
· Get the tools you need. Honor your writing with the kind of paper or notebook you like; buy your favorite pens by the box or spend a bundle on that Waterman or Mont Blanc you’ve always wanted. Have a computer that belongs to you — not one you have to share — and a good printer. It’s amazing what just printing out your writing using a laser jet printer will do to make it look — and you feel — professional. Get a good dictionary, thesaurus, and stylebook. Find books on the craft and subscribe to writing journals.
· Hang out with other writers. Go to readings and book signings, open mikes. Communicate with other writers. Drop a note to someone whose book you admire and tell them (not in a gushy, fan magazine kind of way, but as one writer to another). Sign up for workshops and conferences. Get in a group.
· Read as a writer. Learn from the best. Study your favorite authors, and copy passages into your notebook to get the feel of their rhythm and style. Deconstruct their sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and chapters to discover their techniques and their secrets. Read the work aloud and discuss the books with your writer friends. Next to the act of writing itself, reading good writing will be your best teacher.
Make Time to Write
The second thing you must do to be a writer who writes is make the time to write. This is where many would-be writers fall short. Unless you make the time to write, you’ll never write. Extra time won’t just show up, and if you promise to do your writing “as soon as...” you’ll never get to it. Take it from one who knows. For the better part of twenty-five years, I was a writer who would write “as soon as...”; I had more stops and starts in my writing career than a local train. It wasn’t until I actually set aside writing time on a regular basis that I became a writer who writes.
Make an appointment with your writing self, write it down in your calendar: 2:00 p.m. Monday: Write; 3:30 p.m. Tuesday: Write; 9:15 a.m. Wednesday: Write; and so forth.
Find a time that fits you. Don’t set aside two hours if you can only do thirty minutes. Don’t set your alarm for 5:30 in the morning if you always resist getting up and hate the mornings. You may come to resent your writing as much as you resent the alarm clock. By the same token, don’t say you’ll do it at night after everything else is done if, by 8:30, you’re supine on the couch and can’t keep your eyes open. Find a time that works for you. Take half your lunch hour. Do it right after work. Get up half an hour earlier. If you have the flexibility to make your own schedule, set aside time during the workday.
In my classes I listen to the complaints of students who say they just don’t have time to write, then I ask for a show of hands of those who watch television on a regular basis or those who surf the Web. When the rows of hands waving in the air look like an Iowa cornfield in August, I ask again, “Who can’t find the time to write?” Sheepish grins and embarrassed giggles. Write instead of watching TV, instead of surfing the Web, instead of spending an hour or more reading the newspaper, instead of going out with friends. You have to give up something. Even if it’s only leisure time in front of the tube.
Note: don’t give up taking walks or witnessing sunsets.
You may have always heard that if you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. This is not an absolute rule. Few rules are. To be successful (i.e., a writer who writes), you do have to write several times a week — at least four or five sessions, and every day is best. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon swears by his 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. Sunday-Thursday routine. Part of it is the daily habit of it and part of it is the continuity. The writing will come easier with regular practice, too. You get better at something you do often. Mick Jagger said, “You have to sing every day so you can build up to being, you know, Amazingly Brilliant.”
In a New Yorker (January 28, 2002) article titled “The Learning Curve — How Do You Become a Good Surgeon? Practice,” Atul Gawande related the importance of practice. In writing about elite performers, he said, “[T]he most important talent may be the talent for practice itself.” He referred to K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist, who noted that “the most important role that innate factors play may be in a person’s willingness to engage in sustained training.”
Like exercise or losing weight or taking a class, sometimes it’s a whole lot easier to do it with a supportive companion. Make a date with a friend for writing. If you can’t get together in person, make a phone call or e-mail one another to say, “I wrote today” or “I’m going to write at 6:30 this evening,” or “How’d the writing go today?”
Waiting for inspiration to descend before you write is like waiting for Godot. Interminable. It’s been said that if you show up at your page at the agreed upon time, inspiration will know where to find you. Someone else said, “Writing is 20 percent inspiration and 80 percent perspiration.” Besides, if writing is your daily practice, you won’t need inspiration to get to it. Imagine waiting for inspiration to rest her shining arms around you before you take the dog for a walk or drive to work.
Write
Finally, the third leg in the triangle of being a writer who writes is, of course, doing the thing. Talking about writing isn’t writing. Thinking about writing isn’t writing. Dreaming or fantasizing isn’t writing. Neither are outlining, researching, or making notes. All these may be a part of the whole milieu of the writing life and necessary to getting a project completed, but only writing is writing.
“You can’t sit around thinking,” said fiction writer David Long. “You must sit around writing.”
So every day, at the appointed time (or at some spontaneous gift of time), you sit at your desk (or your table in the café or on the grass in the park), you open your notebook or you boot up your computer, and you write.
Do this every day and I will guarantee you, you will fill notebook after notebook, you will begin and complete stories, essays, narrative nonfiction — whatever you want to write. You will have bits and pieces and wild, imaginative ramblings. You will be a Writer Who Writes.
From Writing Alone, Writing Together by Judy Reeves. Copyright © 2002 by Judy Reeves. Excerpted by arrangement by New World Library. $14.95. Available in local bookstores or call 800-972-6657 Ext 52 or click here.
http://www.grandtimes.com/A_Writer.html
How to Become a Writer Who Writes
by Judy Reeves
Gertrude Stein wrote, “To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.” Who can say what she meant (she also wrote, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”), except perhaps exactly what she wrote: that writing is all and everything of it, the beginning and the end. That to write is to write. We just do it. How to get started writing? Write. How to keep going? Write.
Sadly, for many of us it just isn’t that simple. We have trouble getting started, we have trouble keeping the pace and, too often, we simply give up or our enthusiasm and determination trickle away, like a stream petering out.
But because writing is in our hearts and souls and DNA, after a few weeks or months or even years, we’re back at it again. More determined than ever that, this time, we’ll stay with it.
Maybe we do and maybe we don’t. In my experience as a teacher, more often than not people don’t stay with it. For some, the cycle repeats and repeats. Because we can’t keep the thing going, we begin to judge ourselves failures at writing, our self-esteem goes the way of our tossed out pages, and after a while, it becomes more and more difficult to begin again. This is heartbreaking. Because we are writers and when we aren’t being fully and wholly ourselves — when a piece of ourselves is missing — we can never feel at home in the world or at peace within ourselves. Writing is who we are. Not all of who we are, but enough of who we are that when we’re not writing, we’re not whole.
Claim Yourself As Writer
Until you name yourself Writer, you will never be a writer who writes (and keeps writing).
Most writers I know, especially those who have not published, say, “I want to be a writer.” Or “I’m a [fill in the blank] and I like to write.” Or “I’ve always dreamed of being a writer.” But they don’t actually call themselves a writer. Think of all the other names you give yourself: man/woman, mother/father, wife/husband, friend, teacher, technician, masseuse, lawyer, gardener, chef. We take each of these names as a way of identifying ourselves, both to others and to ourselves. We are what we say we are. In some cultures, new names are assumed when character-evolving events take place. These names indicate the person has been transformed. If you announce you are a writer, rather than simply mouthing that you want to be or you’d like to be, you may be transformed. Try it. Right now. Speak your name out loud followed by, “I’m a writer.” Let yourself experience the sensations you feel when you sound out the words. “But I haven’t been published yet,” you might say, as if this were the thing that would give you the right to call yourself writer. After all, when you tell people you’re a writer, don’t they always ask, “Oh, and what have you published?”
Listen to this: Being published doesn’t have anything to do with being a writer! It has to do with earning money as a writer. Maybe. Getting some kind of validation and recognition, perhaps notoriety and fame. Though truth be told, the majority of published writers don’t earn all that much money or notoriety or fame. We might say, to be published is to be published is to be published. To be sure, getting published is the aim of many of us. After all, we write to communicate, and having an audience is the flip side of the communication coin. But it is not the reason we write. We write because it is what we must do. Anne Sexton said, “When I am writing I am doing the thing I was meant to do.”
Besides, once we are published, this doesn’t mean we will stop writing. We will continue to write. This is what writers do. I have this vision of me at my writing table, a fat roll of butcher’s paper at one end and a take-up reel with a crank at the other end. The paper just keeps passing beneath my pen and I just keep writing. As the old joke goes, “Old writers never die, they just keep revising the ending.”
How do you claim yourself as writer?
First, say it. “I’m a writer.” Say it out loud. Say it to yourself in the mirror. Say it to your friends and family. Say it to the next person you meet at a party who asks, “What do you do?” Say it to a stranger in line at the grocery store. Say it to your mother. Mostly, say it to yourself. “I’m a writer.”
· Make a place for your writing, a sacred place where you go with joy as your companion, not dread or guilt or “shoulds” riding your shoulders like weights of sand. If you don’t already have a room or specific place, make one. Take up a whole room or a section of a room. Before she created her own studio, my friend Wendy used a screen to separate her writing place from the rest of the living room. If the only space you can free up for your writing is part of a table, sometimes, when you’re not eating on it, then make it a special place. When you go there for your writing, bring along a candle or lamp or some flowers, anything that transforms the space from the quotidian to the unique. Make it important and make it yours however you can. Claim the space.
· Get the tools you need. Honor your writing with the kind of paper or notebook you like; buy your favorite pens by the box or spend a bundle on that Waterman or Mont Blanc you’ve always wanted. Have a computer that belongs to you — not one you have to share — and a good printer. It’s amazing what just printing out your writing using a laser jet printer will do to make it look — and you feel — professional. Get a good dictionary, thesaurus, and stylebook. Find books on the craft and subscribe to writing journals.
· Hang out with other writers. Go to readings and book signings, open mikes. Communicate with other writers. Drop a note to someone whose book you admire and tell them (not in a gushy, fan magazine kind of way, but as one writer to another). Sign up for workshops and conferences. Get in a group.
· Read as a writer. Learn from the best. Study your favorite authors, and copy passages into your notebook to get the feel of their rhythm and style. Deconstruct their sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and chapters to discover their techniques and their secrets. Read the work aloud and discuss the books with your writer friends. Next to the act of writing itself, reading good writing will be your best teacher.
Make Time to Write
The second thing you must do to be a writer who writes is make the time to write. This is where many would-be writers fall short. Unless you make the time to write, you’ll never write. Extra time won’t just show up, and if you promise to do your writing “as soon as...” you’ll never get to it. Take it from one who knows. For the better part of twenty-five years, I was a writer who would write “as soon as...”; I had more stops and starts in my writing career than a local train. It wasn’t until I actually set aside writing time on a regular basis that I became a writer who writes.
Make an appointment with your writing self, write it down in your calendar: 2:00 p.m. Monday: Write; 3:30 p.m. Tuesday: Write; 9:15 a.m. Wednesday: Write; and so forth.
Find a time that fits you. Don’t set aside two hours if you can only do thirty minutes. Don’t set your alarm for 5:30 in the morning if you always resist getting up and hate the mornings. You may come to resent your writing as much as you resent the alarm clock. By the same token, don’t say you’ll do it at night after everything else is done if, by 8:30, you’re supine on the couch and can’t keep your eyes open. Find a time that works for you. Take half your lunch hour. Do it right after work. Get up half an hour earlier. If you have the flexibility to make your own schedule, set aside time during the workday.
In my classes I listen to the complaints of students who say they just don’t have time to write, then I ask for a show of hands of those who watch television on a regular basis or those who surf the Web. When the rows of hands waving in the air look like an Iowa cornfield in August, I ask again, “Who can’t find the time to write?” Sheepish grins and embarrassed giggles. Write instead of watching TV, instead of surfing the Web, instead of spending an hour or more reading the newspaper, instead of going out with friends. You have to give up something. Even if it’s only leisure time in front of the tube.
Note: don’t give up taking walks or witnessing sunsets.
You may have always heard that if you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. This is not an absolute rule. Few rules are. To be successful (i.e., a writer who writes), you do have to write several times a week — at least four or five sessions, and every day is best. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon swears by his 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. Sunday-Thursday routine. Part of it is the daily habit of it and part of it is the continuity. The writing will come easier with regular practice, too. You get better at something you do often. Mick Jagger said, “You have to sing every day so you can build up to being, you know, Amazingly Brilliant.”
In a New Yorker (January 28, 2002) article titled “The Learning Curve — How Do You Become a Good Surgeon? Practice,” Atul Gawande related the importance of practice. In writing about elite performers, he said, “[T]he most important talent may be the talent for practice itself.” He referred to K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist, who noted that “the most important role that innate factors play may be in a person’s willingness to engage in sustained training.”
Like exercise or losing weight or taking a class, sometimes it’s a whole lot easier to do it with a supportive companion. Make a date with a friend for writing. If you can’t get together in person, make a phone call or e-mail one another to say, “I wrote today” or “I’m going to write at 6:30 this evening,” or “How’d the writing go today?”
Waiting for inspiration to descend before you write is like waiting for Godot. Interminable. It’s been said that if you show up at your page at the agreed upon time, inspiration will know where to find you. Someone else said, “Writing is 20 percent inspiration and 80 percent perspiration.” Besides, if writing is your daily practice, you won’t need inspiration to get to it. Imagine waiting for inspiration to rest her shining arms around you before you take the dog for a walk or drive to work.
Write
Finally, the third leg in the triangle of being a writer who writes is, of course, doing the thing. Talking about writing isn’t writing. Thinking about writing isn’t writing. Dreaming or fantasizing isn’t writing. Neither are outlining, researching, or making notes. All these may be a part of the whole milieu of the writing life and necessary to getting a project completed, but only writing is writing.
“You can’t sit around thinking,” said fiction writer David Long. “You must sit around writing.”
So every day, at the appointed time (or at some spontaneous gift of time), you sit at your desk (or your table in the café or on the grass in the park), you open your notebook or you boot up your computer, and you write.
Do this every day and I will guarantee you, you will fill notebook after notebook, you will begin and complete stories, essays, narrative nonfiction — whatever you want to write. You will have bits and pieces and wild, imaginative ramblings. You will be a Writer Who Writes.
From Writing Alone, Writing Together by Judy Reeves. Copyright © 2002 by Judy Reeves. Excerpted by arrangement by New World Library. $14.95. Available in local bookstores or call 800-972-6657 Ext 52 or click here.
http://www.grandtimes.com/A_Writer.html
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Yes, I'm back!
I've been picking up interest in writing again. I found my works-in-progress for Woman's World magazine, and I've been reading how-to-write books, The Writer magazine, and books in my genre (Christian (celebate) romances). I'm thinking of revising the Woman's World stories to fit the new 1,000 word limit and sending them in over the summer. Time will tell what comes of all this!
Are you writing? If not, think about why not? Maybe this isn't the time, maybe it is. Ponder that question, and see if you can discover what you need to be doing right now.
Happy writing!
Are you writing? If not, think about why not? Maybe this isn't the time, maybe it is. Ponder that question, and see if you can discover what you need to be doing right now.
Happy writing!
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Reading, but not writing...
I seem to have put writing into the "I'm not sure I'll go back to that" category. I've been doing a lot of fiction reading, but no writing.
Hmmm...what's wrong with this picture? Or - is anything wrong with this picture? A great deal of advice about writing always points to "read, read, read!" Of course, it would be to my great advantage to also "write, write, write," but that hasn't been happening. My energies have been focused elsewhere lately, as I'm in a season of decision-making about other things, and I tend to prefer to 'clear my mind' (AKA avoid thinking about the decisions I need to make) by reading rather than writing.
So, what's a 'writer' to do who isn't writing? Read her genre. Read books about writing. Wait for inspiration to come along before writing (not the ideal, by any means, and not the way professional writers write, but better than nothing at this stage).
Here's one of two books I splurged on for my birthday this past week. I'm enjoying it.
Enjoy your week, and maybe you can fit in some time to relax with a good book! Maybe after you do a little writing?
Hmmm...what's wrong with this picture? Or - is anything wrong with this picture? A great deal of advice about writing always points to "read, read, read!" Of course, it would be to my great advantage to also "write, write, write," but that hasn't been happening. My energies have been focused elsewhere lately, as I'm in a season of decision-making about other things, and I tend to prefer to 'clear my mind' (AKA avoid thinking about the decisions I need to make) by reading rather than writing.
So, what's a 'writer' to do who isn't writing? Read her genre. Read books about writing. Wait for inspiration to come along before writing (not the ideal, by any means, and not the way professional writers write, but better than nothing at this stage).
Here's one of two books I splurged on for my birthday this past week. I'm enjoying it.
New Hampshire Weddings by Rachel Hauck
Enjoy your week, and maybe you can fit in some time to relax with a good book! Maybe after you do a little writing?
Monday, April 16, 2007
HAPPY, HAPPY!
What a surprise I had the other morning as I was reading through the April 2007 issue of The Writer magazine I had borrowed from the library!
In their "Special 120th Anniversary Issue" was a letter I'd sent about an article in their November 2006 issue. If you have the April issue, my letter is on page 7, and it's the very first one! I am so thrilled!
In their "Special 120th Anniversary Issue" was a letter I'd sent about an article in their November 2006 issue. If you have the April issue, my letter is on page 7, and it's the very first one! I am so thrilled!
Monday, March 12, 2007
A new day...
The sun is out, and it looks like a beautiful day. A new day. A day to start a healthy lifestyle with the goal of losing this excess weight. Wait a minute...this isn't a diet blog, this is a writing blog! Okay, there is a connection between my wanting to lose weight and writing. Scratching your head yet? Come on, now - every writer wants to look her best for the dustjacket/author bio photo in her books, and so do I. Am I that confident that I'll get published? As a matter of fact, I am (well, most of the time). Glammin' up for my photo is one way to keep up the motivation and momentum - seriously!
I'm right in the middle of the college class I'm taking on copyediting and proofreading. It's been helpful. My goal for the next couple of months while I'm completing the course is to find the short stories I 'put in a safe place' by emailing them to myself in case anything happened to my computer. Then I'll dust them off and submit them. I'm planning on getting back into writing once that class and another I'm taking on American Sign Language are over.
Hmmm...what could you do to glam up?
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Class on writing for Woman's World magazine...
Happy February!
I've just started taking an online class about writing 1,000 word stories for Woman's World magazine. They pay $1,000 for each story, well worth the $20 I paid to take this course! I've submitted several times before, the last time receiving a nice, handwritten note on the rejection letter. This should be a great class since it's taught by a woman who has sold 25% of her submissions to Woman's World.
Looking forward to learning what it takes to get published - and get that $1,000!
I've just started taking an online class about writing 1,000 word stories for Woman's World magazine. They pay $1,000 for each story, well worth the $20 I paid to take this course! I've submitted several times before, the last time receiving a nice, handwritten note on the rejection letter. This should be a great class since it's taught by a woman who has sold 25% of her submissions to Woman's World.
Looking forward to learning what it takes to get published - and get that $1,000!
Saturday, January 13, 2007
A new year...
Welcome, 2007! It feels like it's been a long time since I posted. I spent a good deal of time at the end of December mulling over things like priorities and goals. Very interesting to think about one's life like that. I settled on a few - okay, more than a few - and set some plans in motion. Success? A little here and there, but that's okay. I'm not going for the "I have to be perfect in everything every single day of the new year." I've gone through that before; it didn't work. I'm going for progress, not perfection, which happens to be this year's motto for FlyLady.
As for my writing, I can't deny the urge to do it. After the burn-out I experienced due to my foray into the working (outside the home) world over the summer and into the fall, and once I'd handed in my resignation, I'd pulled out of every activity I'd been involved in except for two. The ones I wouldn't let go were my class in American Sign Lanuage and my participation in NaNoWriMo. Once those things were over and I got into my "think over my life" phase, I certainly wasn't writing or even studying my craft actively; I was just thinking, which I believe was well worth putting everything else on hold.
Now that the new year is here, I've been moving into action. One thing I don't want to do is to overextend myself like I did before. I'm coming out of burn-out well, but I am concerned about the tendency I've had of taking on much too much and then having to back out of things when I can't do it all. I don't want to do that again. In addition to my plans to achieve some definite and realistic goals in 2007, I've added two classes (American Sign Language 102 and Copyediting/Proofreading), one I'll go to , one that's online. Let's add to that the very distinct possibility of making a major move in the next eight months and having a houseful of stuff to go through and important decisions to make (like where to move). Now add to all that scheduling time to write - can I do it? Should I do it? How can I not do it?
Hoping to update with words of success for every area, including writing!
As for my writing, I can't deny the urge to do it. After the burn-out I experienced due to my foray into the working (outside the home) world over the summer and into the fall, and once I'd handed in my resignation, I'd pulled out of every activity I'd been involved in except for two. The ones I wouldn't let go were my class in American Sign Lanuage and my participation in NaNoWriMo. Once those things were over and I got into my "think over my life" phase, I certainly wasn't writing or even studying my craft actively; I was just thinking, which I believe was well worth putting everything else on hold.
Now that the new year is here, I've been moving into action. One thing I don't want to do is to overextend myself like I did before. I'm coming out of burn-out well, but I am concerned about the tendency I've had of taking on much too much and then having to back out of things when I can't do it all. I don't want to do that again. In addition to my plans to achieve some definite and realistic goals in 2007, I've added two classes (American Sign Language 102 and Copyediting/Proofreading), one I'll go to , one that's online. Let's add to that the very distinct possibility of making a major move in the next eight months and having a houseful of stuff to go through and important decisions to make (like where to move). Now add to all that scheduling time to write - can I do it? Should I do it? How can I not do it?
Hoping to update with words of success for every area, including writing!
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
I did it!
Along with 12,947 other winners, I won this year's NaNoWriMo with a personal, verified word count of 50,116 words!! Three wins in a row! Woo hoo!
Now to discipline myself to continue the editing I started on my first Nano and get it submitted before September 2007, so I can get ready for Nano '08!
Keep writing!
Monday, November 27, 2006
Keep writing!!
Nano will be over in four more days! I put in a lot of hours on Sunday, and my total is now 34,297 words written, with 15,703 to go! I'm 69% done. Keep writing!!
Sunday, November 05, 2006
What a day!
What a day, indeed! So far, I've written 10,341 words with 39,659 to go!
Chapter word totals so far:
Chapter 1: 1885
Chapter 2: 2215
Chapter 3: 2146
Chapter 4: 1736
Chapter 5: 2359
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Friday, November 03, 2006
NaNoWriMo has begun!
NaNoWriMo has begun!
If you've ever had an itch to write and you haven't participated in National Novel Writing Month, which rolls around every November, you're missing a great time!
You don't have to begin on November 1st. It's never too late (well, it is on November 30th!), and it's just plain fun.
So join NaNoWriMo! You don't have to have a plot, characters, etc., ahead of time. (You can have those things written down prior to November 1st, as long as you don't write out the story/dialogue before November 1st.) Just jump write - I mean, right - in!!
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