The Sweet Escape

I feel… excited. Anticipating something great…

I keep a separate blog, a personal blog away from this one because I want this one to be specifically about my writing, focusing on it, keeping it in my face with pinpoint precision. On my personal blog, I don’t have too much excitement about the New Year. It’s coming, whether I get excited about it or not. That’s not to say I’m forlorn or depressed, I just didn’t really create a lot of things to be excited about in the next year. That might change in January but… I’ve become more  seat-of-the-pants in other aspects of my life, not just my writing. We’ll just see what happens.

This blog, though… SIGH (that’s a good sigh). I feel like 2010 is just going to be a great writing year for me. And I’m trying hard not to lose that oomph! and enthusiasm, because I need it. I waste so much time during the year feeling down and avoiding writing because I don’t feel like it, or because I think it sucks or it’s boring and not enough time just dang writing. Get it on paper, edit it later. Or not. Just write! These are the things I yell at myself while I’m watching the fourth straight hour of TV, staring at the Word icon, thinking I should open it.

(more…)

I’ve been thinking, and thinking a lot about the New Year as a writer, and reading lots of great advice on how to approach and achieve my goals. I found this through the #writing chat on twitter, and thought I would share!  Hopefully it will help someone else, it’s definitely given me some things to think about.

Source: Beneath The Cover

Get Re-Excited about Being a Writer!

By Susan Goodsell – Dec 28 , 2009

New Year’s Resolutions—Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you simply cannot escape them!
Personally, January 1st has always given me a thrill. I get a sort of “back-to-school” feeling and enjoy the whole mentality that, “The holidays are over, so let’s crack open a new notebook, sharpen a new #2 pencil, and get to work!”

That said, after many years of disappointment over unrealized and unrealistic resolutions (you know the ones: This year I will go to the gym every day/never raise my voice/take a trip around the world/double my salary/touch nary a chocolate chip cookie/etc.) I’ve grown a bit older and wiser and have tempered my resolution enthusiasm with a bit of reality.

For 2010, my writer friends, I am NOT encouraging you to resolve to:

1. Write three novels (as yet unstarted).
2. Write six hours every single day (in addition to your full-time job).
3. Be a syndicated columnist by March (with a column that has not yet been printed anywhere).
Nor am I encouraging you to follow the path of several of my more cynical friends to, “Resolve not to make any resolutions.”

Rather, I’d like to suggest you get re-excited about being a writer!

Sit quietly for a moment and let that concept settle around you. Do you feel a little tingle inside?

“Getting re-excited” is my theme for 2010 in my BNI business, my writing career, and my personal life. What a great concept!

With the doom and gloom in the economy, real estate market, and in the small business community, I sometimes spend so much time putting out fires that I lose sight of why I do what I do. (And I do love what I do!)

(more…)

Just found this excellent post that I’m planning to put to good use in 2010. Thought I’d share it!

It’s from Year Zero Writers

As writers and creators of content, more and more we’re finding it necessary to turn to the Internet to showcase our work. While we cannot be in several places at the same time, it’s possible for our material to exist in numerous corners of the Internet, all at once. In an age where Literary Agents and Publishers are holding back on marketing their authors’ books we simply have to turn to each other to propel our material to different audiences, something one person can’t possibly do on their own.

This is where you come in. Make a new year’s resolutions to help promote your writer colleagues fromyour little corner of our huge office we call the web.

(more…)

… and a Happy New Year!

Yeah. I’m about to lose my mind up in here, up in here.

I’m setting my literary goals for 2010, and thinking back to 2009. I started the year off with a goal to simply write, and write more. I had really started to get back to it in 2008, late in the year, after a long, decades long, really long break from it. 2009 was the Year of Writing for me, a year of putting my goals in my face and working hard at it. I set a goal for myself to write 200,000 words (or more). I stopped counting the words after 300,000. That doesn’t mean every word of that was good, but I wrote them and that’s saying a lot!

I’m pretty proud of my 2009 as a writer. Even if I tried to write something original and didn’t quite get out of the starting gate. Even if I wrote mostly Fanfiction. Even if my loyal reader count hovers around 10, maybe 20, I wrote. I wrote a lot. I wrote things with meaning, I wrote things that people liked, and I liked. I wrote things that made people laugh. I wrote things that made people cry, that made people hate my characters and love my characters and become intimately involved in the story line. And,

(more…)

(crosspost test)

Last night, at around 11PM, I typed the final, offcial word on my 2009 NaNoWriMo and declared that sucker to be DONE.

Well… done as in done all the major writing, and plotting and structrurally, everything is in place. It needs editing and some oomph and some passion and probably a good spelling and continuity check  but for all intents and purposes, I finished yesterday.

Let us all dance and rejoice.

Official word count is ~93K, just over it… like 93,050 or something. I do plan to add some today before the deadline runs out at midnight tonight, mostly so I can get it over 100,000 words, so that I have a goal to beat for 2010. And then I am going to let it sit for awhile. And then I’m going to tear it apart in January and do my major edits/adds/deletions/flourishes and then I am going to have a copy printed in book form, for myself.

This was my first NaNo, and I have to say I was slightly intimidated– I almost didn’t want to do it. The week before, I had decided I wasn’t going to, and then I had an idea that wouldn’t leave me alone. So on day 1, I started writing it and by day 7 I had 30,000 words and by day 14 I never wanted to see it again and on day 15 I crossed over 50,000 words. Bby day 21 I was cursing wherever this idea came from and damn it all to hell, and on day 27 my friends were rolling their eyes because I had declared that I would not reach the end of my plotline by the deadline and then on day 29, I was like ‘oh, I’m writing the last chapter today’, and today, on day 30… I am pretty darn proud of it.

It’s a good feeling!  NaNoWriMo is a unique experience, one I think every writer should do, at least once. Just to see if you can do it. One of these months I am going to go crazy and do a BloPoMo- Blog Posting Month. I think the national one runs concurrent to NaNo and I can’t do them both at once,  but I could use something of a sprint when it comes to blogging.

As for new writing projects— pfffffffft. I just wrote a novel. Bite me. LOL. Nah, I do have something original still rolling around in my head. I tried to start it this year but just wasn’t ready. I’ll get to it, eventually.

As for old writing projects, I need to get back to/finish my fanfiction epic  novel. In January I will have been writing it for a year. I am, for some reason, not very proud of that. I’m not sure if I should be. Altogether as one piece it is kind of hodge podge. As a series of adventures, it is kind of interesting, I guess. It does need to come to an end, eventually…. when I run out of stories to tell!

I think I am overdue for an ice bath for my fingers and a nap! Ciao, dear readers and thanks for bein’ on this journey with me!

PS- the finished fanfiction version will be edited and posted at my archive (http://www.thesweeetescape.net/fiction) and and at nsync-fiction.com.  The non-fanfiction, cleaned up and edited version will be available somewhere online for reading, open criticism, pointing and laughing sometime in January, I’m guessing? I always overestimate, but I doubt I’ll be able to leave it alone in December!