Tag: writing goals

What Have I Done?: The #ROW80 Wednesday Report

Posted on by M.K. Waller in Uncategorized
“watermelon” by Harsha K R is licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0
“watermelon” by Harsha K R is licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0

My #ROW80 goals posted on July 10, plus progress:

  • Edit the AMW story for its last (I hope) critique;
    Not yet, but tomorrow I’ll get a critique from another partner. It’s better to have everything in before making changes.
  • Write and schedule the WWW post at least two days before the July 19 deadline;
    It’s finished, and SIX days before the deadline. I’m going to the doctor to see what’s wrong–I never finish a piece SIX days before the deadline. I’ll continue to change little things, but it’s polished enough to be posted today. So I’m putting this one in the Watermelon Met* column.
  • Draft the second half of the story “Texas Boss” and turn in to AMW for critique;
  • Finish a very rough draft of “Thank You, Mr. Poe,” the story I started last week;
  • Complete the piece for the AMW blog and schedule it to post before midnight tonight.
    I posted it. Not before midnight. At 3:00 a.m. But I met the AMW deadline, and that’s close enough. Watermelon Met.

Summary: I set out to meet two deadlines and met them. The three remaining tasks aren’t time-sensitive. They carry over. The first, polishing the story for the proposed AMW anthology, must be finished by August 1, so it’s priority.

I’m adding three new goals to the list. Then I’m going to take a nap.

  1. Edit the AMW story for its (I hope) final major critique
  2. Draft the second half of the story “Texas Boss” and submit to AMW for critique
  3. Finish a very rough draft of “Thank You, Mr. Poe,” the story I started last week
  4. By September 5th, read at least ten of the books on my 20 Books of Summer 2016 list. 
  5. Post #ROW80 reports on Sundays and Wednesdays. 
  6. Visit three new #ROW80 blogs a day.
  7. Take three naps a week.* 

*Start as soon as this has been posted.

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Read about A Round of Words in 80 Days (#ROW80)

Read posts by other #ROW80 bloggers–check the list on today’s #ROW80 Linky.

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Watermelon Met will be explained in my Tuesday, July 19 post for Writing Wranglers and Warriors.

The Pledge

Posted on by M.K. Waller in Uncategorized
Title screen for Burbank Films Australia's 198...
Image via Wikipedia

My promise to post daily in April having crashed and burned, I now set out on a new adventure: A Round of Words in 80 Days.

I’m starting late, so my round will comprise only 73 days. But, as Huckleberry Finn says, that ain’t no matter.

A Round of Words in 80 Days bills itself as “The Writing Challenge That Knows You Have a Life.”

Funny–every time I’m positive I don’t have one, I discover I do. This time it was the notorious newsletter. I kept adding and fixing and writing and rewriting, all week long, and finding one more thing to do. It went out Saturday and is slightly shorter than Gone With the Wind.

At this rate, my literary legacy will be titled, The Collected Newsletters of Kathy Waller.

So again I take The Pledge.

The first requirement is to post measurable goals.  Here are mine:

I will

  1. write 500 words a day on Molly, 5 days a week;
  2. exercise for 30 minutes, 5 days a week;
  3. go to bed between 9:30 and 11:00 p.m. every night, including Friday and Saturday.

Those goals are easily measured. Listed in order of importance, they would be reversed, but this is a writing challenge, so writing stays on top.

The second requirement is to sign up by linking this post to the ROW80 list.

The third requirement is to check in on Sundays and Wednesdays.

The final requirement is to end this post and start working on #3.

*****

Image by Burbank Films Australia; Restoration credit: Myself, TaranWanderer (DVD Ltd. DVD release) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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