Final Round 1 #ROW80 Check-In

Leprechaun with rainbow
Leprechaun with rainbow (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m feeling a little like warmed over death this morning after waking up at 3 AM and failing to go back to sleep (which is REALLY unusual for me).  And I’m not sure the sleep I was having before that was exactly quality, as I jolted up in bed, yelling and pointing at the evil leprechauns I dreamed were climbing my curtains.  “STAY!  STAY RIGHT THERE!”

Um, yeah.  That’s a new one.  Usually I do that about giant spiders or Freddy Kruger.  I was very confused when I came fully awake.

So, let’s review the goals I made for Round 1:

  • Finish my Christmas plot bunny novella.  This just didn’t happen.
  • Finish revisions to Daughter of the Hunt.  This didn’t either.  It needs full rewrites and the kind of do over that needs a LOOOONG enough time away that I forget what I had planned before and can take the root concept and create something that’s a bit more me.  Coming to terms with this was a huge thing for me this Round.
  • Make progress on Riven.  As of last night, I was at 43415 on it.  I originally thought this was going to be around 45k.  It’s going to be closer to 60k.  It’s going well, and I should finish it in the next month and be able to get it off to my crit partners.  I wrote around 30k on it this round.
  • Finalize the outline for the first book in this contemporary romance series I’d like to start.  I tabled this one for now.  I still want to write it.  But I decided that this year’s focus needs to be about getting some momentum rebuilt on the self publishing side of my career, and that means a hard core return to focus on the Mirus series.
  • Begin prep for the Psychology and the Law class I’m teaching in the fall. I am just about finished with my chapter 7 (of 15) lecture, so this has been going quite well.  I’ve only missed one week of lecture writing.
  • Write the formatting ebooks class I’ve been promising to teach through WANA International.  Yeah…no.  Just didn’t happen.

But there were other things I did this round that I hadn’t put on my goals list.

  • I did a significant amount of plotting out on two different plot bunnies, one Mirus, one not.  
  • I revisited another YA plot bunny from the fall and moved it into a formal toolkit.  It’s a long way from being ready to write but the framework is there to keep working on.
  • I finished a full novel crit for a friend and some outline crits for a couple of others.
  • I worked on developing my plotting by tarot process, which contributed a lot to those plot bunnies, as well as several scenes where I was getting stuck.
  • I’ve finally created a proper Mirus series bible, which has been on my “I should do that” list for a LOOOONG time.
  • I’ve become a devotee of Evernote for writing projects (the planning of them anyway), courtesy of Susan’s enthusiasm.
  • And I have finally (mostly) let go of the idea that I’m going to get this career thing going by a specified personal deadline.  It’ll happen when it happens.
  • I’m sitting at 37612 words for the year so far, with 54 writing days, 32 non writing days, and 28 plotting days, with an average daily word count of 697.  Not quite where I’d like it, but I had a lot of life stuff going on this round that was mentally distracting, so I’m quite happy to have managed that much.

5 thoughts on “Final Round 1 #ROW80 Check-In

  1. See, you’ve done a lot of stuff! Sometimes we accomplish some things and those things aren’t always what we planned to do. Life changes things around, our brains have “aha” moments, and we just have to go with the flow. Look at your bullet points…there are more in the “accomplished” list than in the “goals” list. 🙂

  2. Had to comment on the dream because Monday I had a nightmare where I kicked one of the little buggers right out of my dream bubble then woke up yelling: “Stop stealing my stuff you pain in the @$$. Get out of here!” Yep… evil leprechauns stealing the gold in my dreamscape to use it to fill their pots. HUMPH I muttered about Lucky Charms all day. lol

    Beware the evil leprechauns!

    You are one busy lady. I can’t keep up even in reading about all the things you get done and are doing. Breathe for god’s sake.

  3. At the end of the day, progress is progress, no matter how much! It seems like you’re doing so much multi-tasking and have a lot of balls in the air and I admire you’re ability to juggle and get done all the things you did (plus have a life!). Thanks for creating ROW80, Kait. I’m grateful for what it’s taught me. And I wish you the best of luck for your next round, your writing career and all the other things that make up your life!

  4. Your round looks similar to mine, with some progress on my original goals, some :p on original goals, and some progress on other writing activity. It’s nice at the end to see how much you actually did, even if it wasn’t exactly what you’d planned to do when you started.

    On a personal note, I’m a little sad the formatting class isn’t ready yet, but hey, you’ll get to it when time allows. Thanks for another great round!

    1. The biggest challenge in writing the class, other than finding the time, is that I’ve fine tuned the process so much, that it takes me like half an hour to format for all styles (other than print) because I’ve trained myself out of all the bad formatting habits. I’ve got to go back to one of my really old files to FIND the bad habits and write up how to undo them, then how to properly set up for clean drafts in the future.

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