• Mauren Johnson has been doing some great posts about NaNoWriMo. So far, I think this one – wherein she compares writing that first draft to rolling a cheese wheel down a hill - is my favorite.

• Confession time – sometimes, when reading books, I skip ahead and read the ending and then go back and read the rest. I’m not ashamed of it. Jaime Callahan isn’t either, and this post is a great defense of that behavior.

• Some Twitter stuff! Okay, this is an “old” post, but I still found Diana Digaya’s post about Twitter hashtags for writers to be very helpful. Because to be honest, Twitter still intimidates and confuses me. Each hashtag is a culture all its own and I don’t necessarily know the rules…

• Speaking of Twitter hashtags, Andrew Mocete is starting a new hashtag for writers entitled #TheRut. Ten cents if you can figure out what it’s about. I love this because I think everyone goes through this, and it’s nice to have a place to support and encourage each other. Kind of like ROW 80! Which I am going to get to now.

ROW 80 UPDATE

To recap, my ROW 80 goals: 

• 1. Finish outline for the first book.
  

• 2. After the outlines are finished, write 4000 words a week on KtLO.

• 3. Write a short short for every meeting of the monthly critique group. 

This week was kind of a mess.

It started out fine. I cleaned up my outline and even significantly reworked the beginning, so I ended up being thankful that I took that space of a week to think it over. I revised the short short I wrote last month. For the most part, I think the big problems are fixed.

But when it came time to work on my short short for the next meeting of the critique group – which is this Tuesday – oh boy.

So, I’d wanted to take a prologue from an aborted novel and work it into a short short. Except that the piece is on an old computer for which I currently lack the power cord, said power chord being at my mom’s house.

No problem! Or at least I told myself. In fact, I decided to go with another short story that I wrote a couple years ago for workshop. This was also on an old computer, but fortunately I have the power chord for that one. However, when I looked for the file, I just couldn’t find it anymore. And then I began to remember that I wrote this story around the time that I decided to clean out my computer and erase all my documents. Now, before you freak out at me, I put everything on a flash drive for safekeeping. But now here’s the part where you can freak out at me – I have no idea where that flash drive is.

Yeah, that’s how unorganized and frankly stupid I can be.

An accurate representation of my filing system

Photo from Alan Levine

Fortunately! And I do mean fortunately. My mom is the complete opposite of me in the organization department, to the point where I’ve compared her to Monica on Friends. Turns out that she had a print-out of the story in a file. Yeah, I don’t know either. She’s kind of a wizard. Anyway, my poor mom agreed to photocopy the story and mail it to me. But first – I got a well-deserved lecture.

It’s too late to submit to the critique group now but I figure I’ll still go because it’s a nice place to talk to other writers (like, in person and stuff) and you don’t have to submit something in order to attend the group. I actually got the story in the mail already so I’m going to start reworking it today for online betas and stuff. And I guess I’ll use it for next month’s meeting. It’s a shame that I already failed part of my third goal, but what can you do? Unless you want to give me a time machine, which I’ll totally take. But really I just need to learn from my mistakes and try be more organized in the future.

Anyway, I’m right on schedule to start working on the first draft of KtLO tomorrow. And I’m excited!

THIS excited

Now, when you’ve been hyping/preparing a story for so long, there’s always the risk that you’ll freeze when you actually sit down to write the darn thing. But I already have a starter paragraph in mind, so I’m not too worried about it.

I’m also not sure about that 4000 word count – right now with NaNoWriMo going on, it seems really puny. But I don’t want to set it much higher in case it overwhelms me. I figure I’ll go with 4000 for a couple weeks and if I find that I keep blowing past it, then I’ll raise it.

The trick is to find that magical number that maximizes your productivity and minimizes your burnout. If you guys have the secret formula for that, please let me know.

Otherwise, I hope you guys have a great week. Please support other ROWers here.

And here’s your moment of cute:

Photo from stevehdc