A bit dry, but also very educating about past, present and history of death care– from clock urns to green cremation. Very interesting.

This brings my reading year to a close, though I do have a couple of books I’ve started. Tomorrow brings a brand new challenge…. I don’t know what to set my goal for, for 2012. Maybe I’ll push myself past 60 and go for 80?

- Finished up a long serial fiction story that I started in January 2009 as a hundred word prompt from Writer’s Digest. It continues to be my “baby”.
- Read 50+ books. I mentioned this before but I’m very proud of achieving that goal! Next year I’m increasing my goal to 60- join me!
- Wrote 120K + words. Yep. That’s a lotta typing.
- Wrote 8 short stories.
-  Four of those 8 were original fiction!
- Started two books- one creative non fiction, one fiction novel. Both are stalled at the moment.
- Joined Atlanta Writer’s Club and Georgia Writer’s Association
- Got knocked down. Got back up again.
- Joined/participated in DIYMFA
- Met four authors: Susan Rebecca White, Kathryn Stockett, Tayari Jones, and Bernice McFadden
- Put my writing on display by joining Six Sentence Sunday
- Featured at Wellness & Writing Connections Newsletter, Storyfix.com and Indie Ink.org
- Led three fiction writing challenges at the Fiction Archive

While I’m in the middle of something, I’m slowly simmering and worrying that I’m not doing enough or writing enough or reading enough or learning enough. I’m not available enough for beginning writers and I’m not paying enough attention to those I can learn from…. but when I step back and take a look at the big picture… it’s a very pretty painting of something I’m very proud of.
Here’s to a busier and better 2012, in which I will PERSIST.

I’ve finished my Secret Santa story for the fiction archive and I don’t plan to do anymore writing this year, so I’m publishing this number as my 2011 count. Still not too shabby for a year when I had unplanned, haphazard writing and didn’t have a serial story to update for most of the year.

I’m planning to take January off from writing. My creative muscle is so tired. I have no ideas, really and I feel like I need to feed my imagination. I’ll be spending January reading as much as possible and trying to prime the pump for ideas and goals for the new year.

I set a goal this year to read 50 books and since I JUST finished book #50, it’s time to celebrate!

I’ve always called myself a voracious reader but in reality I probably read about ten books a year. Then I started writing in earnest and reading a lot helped my writing. So in an effort to feed this symbiotic relationship, I joined the challenge this year.

Looking over the list of the books I’ve read this year, I’m filled with pride and memories. Some were quick reads, some I had to push through. All of them gave me a sense of accomplishment that I’ve been sorely lacking lately.

Next year, I think I’ll add a few more and go for it again! Join me!

I’ve been on a bit of a self imposed exile sabbatical from writing. I need to take a step back and get some perspective and do some thinking and such. Not sure if I got much worked out but I did get a much needed break, so that was good.

I’m jumping back into the writing world by participating in a Blogfest today, hosted by It’s The World, Dear. Today’s Blogfest is simply about planning our summer, which I needed to do anyway.  There are two questions that must be answered:

a) What your current WIP looks like

b) What your writing goals are for the summer

Well. My current WIP looks like a patchwork quilt that has only a few completed patches and hasn’t been sewn together yet. I started with some character interviews and wrote a few scenes, got frustrated and sad and then took a break. Right now I’m trying to decide if I want to move ahead with this project.  It’s likely that I will.

My goals for the summer involve previously mentioned WIP– if I am moving forward with it, I need to jump into it and actually plot out my story line. Maybe fill out a dreaded out line. Flesh out my characters, bang out some more scenes and then edit them down to what seems good and then peice them together. I’m making a concerted effort to not focus on if I think it sounds bad, because I will be editing later. I put a lot of pressure on myself to churn out good fiction, and like they always say, we are our own worst critic and living up to our own expectation is the hardest part.

I also want to do more off the cuff writing. Some drabbles and blogfests and short stories. I say this all the time and then I end up with a 45,000 word “short” story. I can’t help it, stories unfold like novels in my mind!

I think I just need to give myself a dang break.  Get back to the fun in writing.  I’m not going to push out a best seller this year, so relax. Just write.

During that time, I didn’t write or read or obsessively check my writing twitter account. I marked as read most of my google reader “Writers and Writing” blog posts. I don’t think I’ve opened Goodreads all month. And while I ran a challenge at the fiction archive, I didn’t even get an inkling of a new story to write. I read snippets of a few but honestly not a lot keeps my attention as of late. 

Did I miss writing? Honestly? Not really. The minute I decided I was going to put it away for awhile, I felt relaxed and like I could breathe. It’s not like I was doing a ton of stuff instead. I just wasn’t writing.  I’ve yet to figure out why I put so much pressure on myself, but I do. I want to be great and for the words to just flow off of the page and despite the fact that I KNOW it doesn’t happen like that, I still want that because when I read other people’s finished products, my work in progress is nowhere near the quality and the depth and the beauty.

And I hate that. I don’t see natural talent when I look at my work. I see a fledgling mess and I just don’t want to look at that anymore. I’m embarrassed by what I think is good that, in retrospect, SUCKS.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe I will just be stuck at not liking what I see and not working on it. Maybe I’ll pull my head out of my @ss and actually buckle down and get to work, stop comparing myself to other writers and stop feeling like everyone is better than I am. Maybe. As of right now, I’m still on hold. I have no ideas for new things to write and I read through whatever I was working on in April… it has its merits but I don’t think I can turn it into a book.

I also dropped out of Get Your Words Out. Maybe I’ll try it again next year, maybe I’ll just set my own goals, but it just wasn’t as motivating as it had been the previous two years. I also had a lot of fanfiction going, which made it easy to push out 300K words. Fanfic is my safety net and while I’ll probably always write a little something, the foray into original fiction is a challenge. It requires concentration and thought and not just pumping out words. I was getting stressed out thinking about how I would manage to hit my goal, to the point where it was an obstacle. I removed the obstacle. Again, I can breathe.

So, this has been a bunch of rambling to say that my break is over, and I’m not purposely writing but I’m not avoiding writing, either. Let’s hope my break did me some good.

Erm, no. I recently read a FANTABULOUS blog post by Roni Loren entitled “Traditional or Self-Publishing: Defining Your Dream” , based on an article written by Phil Cooke  entitled  How Much Did It Take To Buy You Away From Your Dream?

It immediately made me think of the opener to Pretty Woman, in which a corner salesman shouts out, “Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream?”  I wrote a short (fanfiction) story based on Pretty Woman, and read it just last night, so odd that it would come up, today.

Anywayz, Roni’s post talks about that line in Up in the Air, when George Clooney’s character is getting ready to fire this middle management guy (who used to be a Chef) and stops to ask him how much it took to buy him away from his dream. When did stability and security become more important than doing what  made him happy? Roni applied this to her writing life by examining what her dream is, as an author, and which path was more likely to take her there. She writes:

Here’s what my dream consists of:

• The chance to share my stories with others and (hopefully) entertain them.
• The ability to at least make a similar salary writing books as I was making as a  management recruiter (The job I had before I had my son.)
• Validation from professionals that my writing is good and marketable.
• To hold my book in my hands and see it on the shelves of bookstores.
• Okay, and having some fans and a big readership wouldn’t suck.

So when you analyze the main components of my dream, you can probably see why self-publishing an ebook wouldn’t have been the total fulfillment of my dream. I could have accomplished some of these, but not all of them. And some people may scoff at the validation piece, but I wanted to prove to myself that I could land an agent and a big publisher. Maybe it’s bad to look to others to measure if I’m “good enough” but that’s how I’m built when it comes to my writing.

She also writes that it’s important for each writer to discover their own dream and determine what it will take to achieve it. This makes me really stop to think about what my dream as a writer is.

I haven’t always been as SRS BZNS as a writer as I have been in the past year or so. I wrote in high school and liked being called talented. I wrote in college and found that papers came out pretty easily. I attended Creative Writing Conferences and won awards and even a scholarship for my writing. And then I graduated from college and subsquentely lost about half my IQ points. I honestly began reading again because I felt like I was getting dumber every year.

Through reading, I started to miss writing. I returned to writing with fanfiction because it was easy– the world was already built, and your readers are already going to know your characters. Change the setting and situations, add your original characters, mix at high speed, bake and serve. My fanfic stories have always hung on the very edge of fanfiction, though… which is why I’m trying to take the next step into original adult fiction.

But is my dream to just write stories and load them up on my archive and never pimp them and never have anyone ever read my work? Do I want to be published? Do I want an Agent and an Editor and a Publishing contract? What’s my dream? And how much would it take to buy me out of it?

Unlike a lot of writers my age, I’m single. And childless. And petless. I don’t even have a plant– seriously, I don’t even have any mold growing anywhere. It’s just me, so unless I win MegaMillions, it’s not like I can choose writing over the stability and structure of of my day job. That sort of answers my question for me. The exact amount of my annual income is what it costs me, every year, to buy me out of my dream. And if I’m being honest, seeing my book on a bookshelf at a bookstore would be a total dream come true. Having someone send me an email that says ‘you don’t know me but I read your book and could really identify with your charatcters’, or ‘your book really affected me’ or even ‘you’ve inspired me’  would be great.

For me, I don’t think it’s a matter of being published traditionally, or indie, or self. It’s a matter of doing it PERIOD. I’ve sort of always thought that I’d go for the big guns and if 99 peopl said no, I’d take the hint. For me, stability and security and my dream have to co-exist. At least for now, one feeds the other. If I lost my job, no way could I concentrate on writing. I’d be too busy worried about where my next meal or rent payment is coming from. If I quit writing, I fear I’d become a very tense, even more introspective person and never let anything out, ever again. That, my friends, would be UNGOOD.

Today’s post really, really got me thinking about this dream, though. I mentioned yesterday that my writing persona is like a secret identity and at some point I might have to unveil her, if I plan on actually achieving my dream. That’s really frightening to me… and you know what that tells me? It won’t be a matter of what I publish and what route I take. It’ll be the sheer terror of putting myself out there.

 My fear is what it will take to buy me away from my dream.

Does anyone else feel this way? Or am I on Lonely Island? Anyone else absolutely scared out of their mind… that they might make it?

Back in January I decided that I was going to submit my writing to a publication. I set my goals mighty lofty and since I’d been circling the Glimmer Train wagon for awhile, I decided to submit a short piece of historical fiction called “Hero” for the Very Short Fiction Award and also the Standard Short Story (March 2011). I just read the announcement from Glimmer Train that they have announced the top three (of the Top 25) winners for January 2011. My piece was not on the list.

I did not expect to win, so it’s not a huge disappointment.  I plan to read the pieces chosen when I receive my copy so I can see my competition and what I came up against. And of course I’ll write again and submit again.

I am still up for the Standard Short Story– they won’t announce those winners until March 30, but I’m expecting the same result. I guess this means that I can shelve the piece or submit it elsewhere. I’ve yet to decide if I’m going to do that and if so, where I’ll send it. I need to do more research on Duotrope but I’m so overwhelmed by that site.

My mom liked it. So… there’s that.

I am not writing tonight because I finished my story! Yay. It ended up being a little over 40,000 words. It is posted at the Fiction archive and also at my archive here.

I’ve also updated my word count for March, since I don’t plan to do any more writing this week. I ended up at 105,742 words so far for the year. My goal is 350,000 for 2011, so uhm… I have a lot more writing to do.

I’ll be getting ready to fly to New York tomorrow and Wednesday! So excited! I hope I can make it to WORD in Brooklyn– I just really want to go there. Until then, I’ll be mentally prepping myself for my next adventure. I promised my writer friend that I wouldn’t write any more fan fiction until I wrote something original. SIGH. So I am going to spend April mapping things out and trying to start something new.  Original never comes as easily to me as fan fic does, but I have to get off the easy train. No one is going to publish my fan fiction.

Is it literary perfection? HA! Hardly. Some of it is really bad. Some of it is boring. A lot of it is unrealistic and just plain reaching, especially to me, and I wrote it! What it is, is 2 years of progress. Two years of writing, two years of practice, two years of improvement. I can definitely see a difference between my first chapter and my last– all the tips I’ve picked up from writing blogs, and books on writing, and tips from writers and from novels. The change in how my writing has developed is obvious.

It was not easy. In fact if you read through this blog, you’ll find that I flail about quite easily and frequently. It’s hard for me to fall in love with my own words, when I want the words to literally jump off of the page and into your mind and heart. I want readers to nod along and understand, and as James Patterson has coined the phrase, “unputdownable”. I want that word to describe the things that I write.

I feel like I have a ways to go before I get there. But today I am closer to that than I was two years ago. And that’s what I call progress.

So now I am sitting here twiddling my thumbs and thinking… now what? For the first time in years, I don’t have a new chapter brewing in my mind. I don’t have an end point that I have to reach. The story– which was burning inside me, demanding to be told– is complete.

Maybe now I can think past this story… past this genre and write something new. Maybe something original.