ROW80 Week 3: Average

Here’s my linky for this week.

I kept pretty close to my goals this week, neither running ahead nor falling behind. My 1,500 words took the form of research notes for a non-fiction project. I got slightly ahead by writing a sonnet, but then put up my reflection slightly later than I’d planned. So all that more or less evened out.

As to my other two goals (make progress on Conkers, and read a book a week): not behind yet, but I do need to focus on these a bit more. With three weeks past and nothing at all written towards Conkers, finishing the arc by the end of Round 2 is starting to look less than certain. I did at least look at it again this weekend, but that won’t mean anything if I don’t follow it up.

Accordingly, I’m setting an extra goal for this coming week: Write something towards Conkers, even if only something short.

Reading isn’t so much ‘behind’ as poorly balanced. I did finish a book — a whole book, this time! — on Saturday, but only because I made an effort to catch up on it after falling behind during the week. That isn’t the way I wanted my reading to work. The idea was to add reading to the list of things I normally do in the evening, not to make it a box to tick when I had the energy. I did get started on several other interesting books this week, though, so it may just be a matter of time.

As to what I actually read: it was The Traitor Queen, by Trudi Canavan. The thing I liked most in it was the way scenes were cut to create suspense. There are a few points where a scene ends with a problem of some kind, and by the time we catch up with characters again, they’ve somehow fixed it. The thing is, we don’t find out what the solution was until its consequences start to matter, which lets the suspense of the scene last (I assume) longer than it otherwise would.

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Reflection (ROW80 Week 3)

Most of the writing I did this week was notes on research for a non-fiction project. I tried reflecting on it, but it seemed like a lot of it was already reflection on the research, so I’m not sure how useful that would be.

Instead, I’m reflecting on a sonnet.

I was trying to write a poem that sounds like it’s talking about an evil overlord, but turns out to be a metaphor for something else. That meant I was a lot more analytical about writing it than I usually am, since I wanted all the lines to make sense both ways around. My usual experience is that being analytical doesn’t help my writing, so I’m worried I’ve not written it all that well.

Reading through it, I can spot several points where the phrasing doesn’t really work. In trying to come up with something that fits the literal meaning, the metaphor, the rhyme scheme, and iambic pentameter, I’ve stuck words together in ways that aren’t really very grammatical. That actually looks like the sort of thing I could fix in editing. However, “apply your left brain” doesn’t seem likely to fix errors caused by being too left-brained.

On the other hand, I tried editing it a bit while writing this, and I think I did fix most of the more glaring flaws.

While I’ll reserve judgement on the poem itself — I usually leave them a few weeks before deciding wether they’re worth posting — there is one definite good point to all of this. So long as I’m attempting things I can’t do easily, I’m hopefully learning how to write better poetry.

ROW80 Week 2: Rethinking (my) Reflection

This is my second ROW80 update for the second round (linky). Again, I’m pretty happy with my progress this week. I wrote around 3,300 words: four sonnets, over two thousand words on a short story, and part of a dialogue tree for my computer-game project. In terms of strict word count, I’m well and truly up to speed.

I’m also up to speed with my reading goal, albeit due to a bit of tricky wording. While I did finish Anne Bishop’s novel Heir to the Shadows this week, I actually read half of it last round. That ambiguity is in my goals deliberately, though: if I had to read a new book each week, I’d have no reason to finish things I started earlier.

I wouldn’t say that I’m a raving fan of Heir to the Shadows, but I do admire the way Bishop integrates what her characters do at home into the stories — we don’t only see them in danger and out doing things. Partly, this just involves starting and ending the trips into danger at home, but I think it’s also because she finds more drama in the characters’ relationships. I suppose this is to do with the book being not strictly heroic fiction; if I want to emulate it, I need to be more familiar with non-fantasy genres.

My other two goals are making progress on Conkers, and reflection. I didn’t do any more writing on Conkers this week, but the short story is at least in the same setting. It’s also something of an epilogue for one character, so I might be able to use it to work backwards into the main story. So, better than last week.

However, I think I have to admit it’s too late to get reflection done this week. My problem is that I usually write reflection at the same time as my ROW80 update, so if I run late on the update, I tend to lose sleep writing the reflection. I might be better off setting up a specific time for reflection, and then just posting an update without it if I miss that deadline. For now, I’ll say reflection is due at midnight on Saturdays — no staying up late to finish it then, either.

ROW80 Week 1: Better with Practice

This is my first ROW80 check-in for the new round (linky). So far, it’s going well. My progress this week almost exactly matched my goals: I read one book, and wrote just over 1000 words.

The book was Super Crunchers, a non-fiction book arguing that statistics are better than humans at almost everything. I’m still not sure whether I agree with that idea or not, but it has given me some interesting ideas about prophecy-based societies.

The writing came about in a slightly interesting way: I spent most of my free time this week playing a computer game, to the point where I wanted to make a game myself once I reached the weekend. With that as my motivation, I wrote some letters intended to be part of the story of that hypothetical game.

This isn’t quite what I’d planned; I was intending to read fiction, and to write on one of my existing projects. However, I did spend most of the week playing computer games, and was away on Sunday — circumstances that usually make me fall behind. If this was a bad week, I should probably be able to do 1,500 words per week after all.

ROW80: Ending Round 1, Starting Round 2

This is my final post for my first round of ROW80 (linky), and also my first post of the new round (Round 2 linky).

I only worked on my new WIP this week, so the old one’s still just short of my 18,000-word goal. But I did at least meet it if you count both WIP’s together, and I well and truly did if you count everything else as well. My total word count for this round was around 23,520 words: 17,100 my old WIP, 2,225 on the new one, 18 sonnets averaging 100 words each, 100 words or so of miscellaneous poetry, and 2,300 words of other writing. This doesn’t include my ROW80 blog posts.

ROW80 Week 12: Other shiny things

Almost my last update for this round! (And almost my last linky.) What happens this week will decide whether I meet my goals or not. And it actually will be the deciding week, since I’m just shy of both goals:

I wrote three sonnets this week (around three or four hundred words), another scene in my main WIP (850 words), and a scene in the new WIP (600). Being away on the weekend wasn’t as much of a problem as I’d feared; I was also away from my usual distractions, and had plenty of new things to use for inspiration.

All that writing adds up to 1800 words or so. I did aim for 2200 words for this week, but then I did another 400 words while working on my reflection last week, which means I’m fully caught up from last week.

I’m also apparently closer than I thought to my whole-round goal. I must have been miscounting something, because when I checked today I got a count of over 17,000 words. That means I could still finish my eighteen thousand words this week if I get a good amount of writing done on Tuesday. For both this and the weekly quota, I need around 750 words.

Regardless of whether I manage that, I can claim at least one success this round. In the spirit of focussing on the positive, I need to remember my original goal was to write in my ongoing setting, and my new WIP is a step in that direction.

ROW80 Week 11: A Low Ebb

Here’s my ROW80 linky for this week.

I didn’t make any progress on my WIP since last week. I did do about 600 words of other writing, though: half sonnets, half the start of a new story. At this rate, I don’t think I’ve got much chance of meeting my goals for the round. As of last week, I’m at about 14,300 words, so I need another 3700 to meet my whole-round goal.

Since I ended this week 700 words behind, I need 2200 words to keep up with my week-by-week goal. I’d expect to manage that, except that I’ll be away for work on the weekend, and I doubt I’ll get much writing done.

Nonetheless, I think I’ll aim to get those 2200 words done by the end of the round next Wednesday. That will give me 1500 words per week over that week-and-a-half period, and put me pretty close to the eighteen-thousand-word goal I originally chose for the round. With luck, I can put most of those words towards my WIP;  I’m only two or three sessions away from tying off a story arc, which would be a good spot to set it aside for a while.

ROW80 Week 9: Recovering from a Stop

I’m not writing anywhere near as much as I was last week, but I am getting back into the swing of things. I only wrote 2 sonnets during the week, but then spent Friday evening writing a 2000-word comparison of grammar checking software. It’s not the kind of thing that could really lead anywhere — mostly just complaining about things the spelling checkers got wrong — but it was writing.

In addition, I did get nearly 900 words on my WIP on Sunday. Overall, this puts me at about 2,100 words of varying quality for this week. I definitely want to do more on my WIP, but that’s a number I can be happy with.

Before I go on to reflection, here’s my linky for this week.

ROW80 Week 8: Hurtling to a Stop

After a few good weeks, I’m falling behind again. All I’ve written since Wednesday is a sonnet. That puts me at around 2,200 words for the week, or around 1000 if you ignore the philosophy-related stuff.

I was away this weekend, but this time, I don’t think that’s the problem. Even though I didn’t get any writing done on Friday, I could have got lots done on Saturday. And the thing is, I did — just not on this project. I did some research for one of my other projects, finally got around to doing some programming, and was distracted mostly by things I thought were somewhat worthwhile.

In other words, the problem now is that I’m applying the habits ROW80 taught me to other projects. I remember someone else in ROW80 blogging about the importance of doing multiple projects (sorry that I can’t remember who; I’ll edit in a link if I do). Unfortunately, most of my other projects at the moment aren’t really writing-related, so I can’t easily transfer my goals over to them.

I could change my goals, but I do still really want to finish this story; it’s the longest thing I’ve ever written, and I want to prove to myself that I can follow something like this right through to the end (or at least the End of Part One).

I suppose I’ll keep trying to work on my WIP, but accept that I might be doing some of my 1500 words on other projects for the next few weeks.

Good luck and happy writing!

PS: Here’s my linky for the end of Week 8.

PPS: No reflection today, since I haven’t done the writing to reflect on; and I need to get to bed.

ROW80 Check-in, Middle of Week 8

Here’s my linky for this week.

This check-in is a mixture of good and bad; perhaps slightly more bad. I’ve only done about 880 words on my story so far, and I did them a day late. However, this was because I’d already written something else on Tuesday: around 1,300 words on heroism and alignment in the context of various ethical systems. Counting this as extra writing, I’ve done 2,100 words already, so breaking 3300 by Sunday is still within my reach.

My bigger concern is that I left this too late, and now will miss out on sleep due to the time spent writing this. At least tomorrow’s Friday.

As to reflection: firstly, it seems like doing ROW80 has made me more inclined to write. Both the pieces I wrote this week were spur-of-the-moment things: a to-do list that evolved into a discussion of the items on it, and a scene I suddenly got inspired to write while listening to music.