It’s January 31 which brings me to the end of Margie Lawson’s fabulous Defeating Self-Defeating Behaviors online course.
So did I slay my dragons?
Yes and no.
You see these are the kind of dragons that resurrect themselves. SELF-DOUBT can make a new appearance when I’m faced with a new opportunity, a request, an offer of a critique. And then his other head PROCRASTINATION makes another appearance offering solace.
For now, these dragons are caged in the corner, and I’ve hung a large sign at the front that says “DO NOT FEED THE DRAGONS”
So when these dragons appear in my life, I will laugh at them, I will not listen them, I will jump in do what I need to do, armed with my Winner List and my Superstar List. They may breath fire, but they are big and bulky and I can outrun them, as long as I keep acting on my goals and moving forward.
I’ve learned so much during the last four weeks and I have Margie to thank, and my fabulous change coach Lesley to thank, along with a bunch of amazing classmates who were willing to battle their dragons and share their insights.
My fellow We Love YA blogster, Natalie Hatch, made me a hula hoop in November last year. Putting Margie’s DUH theory into practice, hula-hooping is now a daily part of my life and I can proudly say I can hula hoop, though no tricks yet. But at the beginning of the month, I could barely keep the hoop spinning, so the tricks will come soon.
I cannot recommend Margie’s course highly enough. Although the course is offered online only once a year, you can visit her website and buy the lecture pack. Better still, buddy up with a friend to be your change coach, and do the course together.
Margie also offers some fantastic courses in editing. The next course is Empowering Characters’ Emotions held online in March through PASIC, and Nat and I have already enrolled. Take that, you Self-Doubt/Procrastination dragon. Ooh, I just stabbed him in the belly. He’s not looking too happy at the moment. Mastering the craft aspect of writing (and editing) may make him redundant. He might have to find someone else to hassle.
I just remembered: when I turned 27, I had a 7 year old birthday party and we played kids games all afternoon. My mum made me a dragon cake – he was gorgeous.
But this was only a year or two before I did a life-changing self-development course, met my partner, lost my mum and decided to pursue writing seriously. Perhaps the cake was a symbol of the dragons I was going to have to face.But then again, that cake got cut up and eaten and he was delicious. Maybe that’s how I need to treat all my dragons from now on.
(turns to look at cage). Mmm, SELF-DOUBT dragon, I’m hoping you taste like chocolate.
So now I’ve reviewed and dissected 2009, it’s time to set some goals for 2010.
DAILY
Do something writerly every day. Write new words, rewrite old words, edit, tinker, synopsise, plan, plot, outline, query, collage, give my characters the 3rd degree – as long as it’s writing related.
WEEKLY
Okay, so I’m going to commit myself to making a mess once a week and creating a collage poem. Not committing to cleaning up the mess.
Blog at least weekly here at Write on Track, and on Sundays at We Love YA and one day each week at the Romance Writers of Australia blog.
PROJECT GOALS
Beyond Happily Ever After to be edited, polished and submitted to agents until Cindy finds a home.
Diary of the Future to be edited, polished and submitted until it finds a home (agents and publishers)
Making the Cut to be submitted to publishers.
Collage Poetry Anthology with Jen Gordon to be produced by end of November.
And another of my current zero drafts (yet to be determined) to be hacked and slashed and rewritten.
50ks in 30 days in June is penciled in, but I’m not firmly committed at this point to write another 50ks of a new project – let’s see how the first five months pan out first.
Nanowrimo – again a tentative maybe I will and maybe I won’t.
I know I can write, and I know I can write fast. I don’t necessarily need the 50ks and Nano challenge to prove that to myself anymore. But I do spend time focusing on editing and rewriting and producing the best manuscripts I can.
I would like to finish the 12 Step Fairy Program at some point.
I’m very fond of Felicity, my fairy-dust snorting grandmother. Maybe I can fit it in this year.
Other writer events:
To get myself in the right frame of mind for 2010, I’m beginning the year with another Margie Lawson course: Defeating your Self-Defeating Behaviour. Yes, I have a few dragons to slay and I learned a lot from the last Margie course that I did. I’m enrolled. Bring it on – January 4th.
I will attend another Writers Retreat with the Nambucca Valley Writers Group in May. This year we are going to a different venue, and trying a different approach. Instead of presenting workshops to each other, we will be each working on whatever creative project takes our fancy at the time.
I will attend Byron Bay Writers Festival again. (yes, it’s a ritual).
And this year, I will attend the Romance Writers of Australia conference in Sydney. That will mean I can catch up with all my writer friends, my Sydney family and a few Sydney friends.
My writing mantra for 2009 WRITE EDIT SUBMIT has been rewritten for the new decade as I’ve done enough new writing just for the moment.
So 2010 will be the year that I REWRITE EDIT SUBMIT. Ad Infinitum.
As usual, it’s all about writing. I’m still trying to stay Write on Track!
As promised, here are the sunrise photos from January 1, 2000.
How things change in 10 years. This little girl is now an ‘adult’ and delighted me – not! – by phoning at four o’clock this morning to wish me a Happy New Year.
I bet she wasn’t watching any sunrise this morning. And you know what, neither was I!
What are you writing goals for 2010?
Where did the last decade go? It spun by faster than I could imagine – it seems like yesterday I was dancing on the banks of the Macleay River dressed as a Millenium bug, and the next morning the first sunrise of the millenium was glorious…I’ll bring you a photo tomorrow (need to scan it first!)
So it’s time to look at my 2009 goals and what I actually achieved. Perhaps I bit off much more than I could chew.
DAILY GOAL
Do something to further my writing every day (write, edit, critique, submit).
Achieved: Most days, though I know there were some where I just got sucked way into the internet or into the couch and did not contribute to my writing. But the first half of 2009, I was on track with this, and regular writing appointments with Deanna Carlyle went a long way to honouring this goal.
WEEKLY GOAL
Create a new collage poem a week.
Whoops. I created a few during my Writers Group retreat, but for the most part I didn’t do much collage. I made an attempt at creating some erotic collage and just did not have the right words – the Cleo and Cosmo mags let me down with titles that were more titillating than sensual. And somehow, I just didn’t want to do a collage poem about blow jobs, which seems to be a fixation of these magazines.
Here’s a couple I did during the retreat:
Face it: collage is messy. You need time to get into that head space and into the mess. And time to clean it all up again. But as the stockpile of old magazines grows and grows, I realise I have to cut up the useful words to make some storage. I did make a couple of attempts to make a black out poem as per Austin Kleon, but I found that I couldn’t see the trees for the forest.
So the anthology goal (in co-collageship with Jen Gordon) will be reset for 2010 and I will just have to get my head around the mess-making.
(And Jen has left us to do a design course in Sydney in 2010 – yay Jen!)
MONTHLY GOAL
One short story per month.
I completely forgot about this one (apologies to Karina). I guess that’s what happens when you leave your goals on your blog, and don’t print them out and stick them in your diary so that they’re in your face every day. (I will print out my 2010 goals!)
So there were no short stories this year.
YEARLY GOAL
WRITE EDIT SUBMIT and beat writing 200, 078 words.
Well – I wrote, I edited and I submitted to contests.
Let me work out how much I wrote. I know it won’t be more than the figure above.
115, 193 words written in 2009. That does not count rewriting. I find that difficult to keep track of.
That’s okay. Because I wanted to focus on editing and submitting in 2009.
So my project goals for 2009 were:
1 Finish writing the first draft of Reality Check – completed. Yay!
2. Complete edit of Making the Cut. Submit until it finds a home. - completed. Now with CP.
3. Complete edit of Diary of the Future. Submit until it finds a home. - not touched.
4. Complete edit of Beyond Happily Ever After. Submit until it finds a home. - halfway through.
5. Write 50ks in 30 days in June with my RWA pals. – wrote 37,168 words.
6. Write 50ks during Nanowrimo in November. – wrote 21,146 words
Beyond Happily Ever After went into 3 competitions: The Stiletto, The STALI and The Emerald.
Reality Check was entered into The STALI.
So what else happened in 2009?
The annual and warmly anticipated Nambucca Valley Writers Group retreat to Smokey Cape Lighthouse:
I even gave a workshop on Writing Sex Scenes. Scary stuff!
I did Margie Lawson’s Writing Body Language online course. Fabulous!
And I submitted Beyond Happily Ever After to the Hachette Qld Writer’s Centre Manuscript Development Program.
I didn’t attend the Romance Writers of Australia conference in Brisbane. Instead I joined my sisters in crime, Sandie Hudson and Rhian Cahill in running the Clayton’s Conference, and did we have a ball! – with lots of competitions, chat sessions, Q&A’s and tutorials. It was full on, and I was possibly more exhausted than if I’d attended the real life conference. Have you even tried to MC an online an awards ceremony, repost prize winners from the real ceremony and update a blog simultaneously? Then you haven’t lived.
After spending the year as part of the web team for Romance Writers of Australia, I put my hand up to join the Executive Committee. So I’m now the Social Media Manager which includes looking after our email loop, Twitter and be the blogmistress of the RWA blog, and look for more opportunities to expand RWA’s social media universe with my great team.
Plus I joined the We Love YA blog team set up by my fabulous critique partner, Kiki , Natalie Hatch, Amanda Ashby, Sara Hantz and Vanessa Barneveld. During the year we added Steph Bowe and Ellie Royce to our team.
And this is why I have been absent so much from this blog. It all takes time. Plus I had to apply for the position I was working in on a temporary basis and got the promotion. But I promise tomorrow, I will make a new commitment to this blog.
And a rewrite of this writing mantra: Write Edit Submit
HAPPY NEW YEAR and see you in 2010!
It’s the end of the first day of Nanowrimo and with a word count of 3004 and a body count of 1, I’m quite satisfied. My story opens with Hilda McGeachin choking to death on one of her pumpkin scones, leaving the presidency of the Bilby Creek Show committee vacant. With the unfortunate death of two older committee members before the story opens, the committee needs some fresh blood very quickly. I had planned that Wally was also going to meet an unfortunate end, necessitating his niece Kirsty’s return to Bilby Creek but she’d already decided that she’s coming back before I had a chance to give him a heart attack. So I guess I should have killed him off in Book 1 when I had the chance.
All my words have been written with my new toy, the wonderful desktop version of ‘Write or Die’. The new features on the desktop version are fabulous with lots of adjustable settings in font, colour, sound files. It keeps track of your highest score, your average words per hour and there is a word war feature so you can challenge another person to a word war. No more lost words, which I occasionally encountered in the online version – the desktop version allows you to keep adding to a text file and timestamps each new entry. I have Write or Die set up on my netbook so tomorrow at lunchtime if I stop writing, my colleagues will be in for a surprise when ‘Peanut Butter Jelly’ or screaming babies burst out of my speakers. I love Write or Die – it makes me focus on the story and switches off the internal editor. Though, I did try it with the disable backspace feature and that sent me insane. I have to have the ability to backspace because I sometimes change my mind mid sentence or type the wrong name.
My characters are on Twitter are very excited that they will be in a new story – Kirsty has been tweeting most of the day. With the new Twitter ability to create lists, I have a list of my characters and you can follow them here: http://twitter.com/chickollage/my-characters . Of course, their tweets will also still appear on the sidebar of this blog.
My Nano report card tells me that if I continue at this rate, I’ll hit the 50k target on November 17. That’s a big ‘if’. It’s a nice day one but I’m not sure I can do that pace on the days that I’m working. But the great news is I won’t be going to the day job every day of November. I’ll have two whole weeks off, so maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to complete this story…wherever it’s going.
It’s Monday of the holiday weekend. Daylight savings has kicked in and I’m feeling jet lagged and hazy without going anywhere. Too much sleep? Perhaps.
My absenteeism from the blog has seen it plummet on the list of Top 50 Australian Writing Blogs by 44 places. I’m no longer in the Top 50 but instead the We Love YA blog has shot up 55 places to no. 30 so I’m proud of that. Now to get the Romance Writers of Australia blog on the next listing.
I’ve been busy editing and polishing and agonising, submitting to contests. Getting feedback from contests, both motivational,constructive, and sometimes debilitating. And polarising – 132/135 & 82/135 for the same entry? What do you mean a story has to start at the beginning? Guess she’s never never read a non-linear story before. 2nd judge just did not get it. It has really proven to me how subjective judging is.
But in all this editing and polishing and submitting, I have hit a writing dilemma – well it’s more a deadline dilemma. The dilemma of the hypothetical deadline.
What’s a hypothetical deadline? It’s one of these: If your manuscript is selected, you will have 72 hours to provide the full manuscript. That was part of a recent writing opportunity I entered — submit the partial, and if selected, the time bomb would start to tick. So theoretically, the date of the announcement of the selections was the deadline for the full manuscript to be polished. But the ‘if’ made it a hypothetical, ‘pie-in-the-sky’, an ‘I can only dream’ that this will happen.
It did not make it real.
Despite my self-talk of ‘when they call me’ and working out a time-line of how many pages I needed to edit each day to make the deadline, my confidence in the project vacillated so much with varied feedback from contest judges (see above) and critique partners that in the end, I did not make the hypothetical deadline. Other pressures of having to reapply for my job (and that application went through 4 drafts) along with building the Social Media function for Romance Writers of Australia (as part of my new role as Social Media Manager) ate up a lot of potential editing time. And then the deadline withered up and disappeared as if it had never even existed, with the email that began “Dear Writer”.
I was both disappointed and relieved. But I haven’t looked at Beyond Happily Ever After since — it will go on the backburner for a while. I’ve returned to Making the Cut, preparing it for another contest and submission to publishers. It feels good to be back in Bilby Creek – the town is so familiar to me that it’s like a homecoming, and the characters of Bilby Creek are my friends. The full manuscript of Making the Cut will go into this competition (and the deadline is real and unmoveable). The first 3 chapters of the sequel, Reality Check, have been submitted to another comp, and I plan to write the next in the series during Nanowrimo. Yep, it’s good to be home.
When I woke up Wednesday morning, I was surprised to see the colour of the sky out the window. It was a murky brown colour, like we were in a soup. At first, I thought there was bushfire in the hills, but then I heard the radio reports: Coffs was disappearing from view from the lofty windows of the radio station.
This is what the sun looked like when I left home:
At work, we watched the sky stay brown all day. It was eerie – we’d landed in some strange universe or a post-apocalyptic world. And yet on the inside, everything was functioning as normal. But the building wasn’t sealed, and the dust started seeping in gradually during the day. By the afternoon, my throat was dry and my eyes were starting to water.
Driving home, I was amazed by the sun. It was a big white orb, glimpsed through the trees. When I reached the valley, I stopped to take another sun picture – looking like a full moon.
Apparently my cat spent the whole day hiding under the bed. He knew better than to try to go out in a dust storm.
Thursday morning – the sky was blue again. But everything is still dusty. And they predict more to come.
This is what I want for my birthday…
A Book Tree
Though I hope that my book tree would produce better books than this one. This was the discount book tree with such wonderful titles as How to Sell on Ebay and other non-fiction books which had been remaindered a long time ago.
Perhaps the Book Trees produce their fruit in different genres depending on what type of tree you startwith.
If that’s the case, I would like a Young Adult Book Tree, a Women’s Fiction with Attitude Book Tree and a surprise Book Tree.
A money tree would be good too. Though having a Book Tree would mean more money anyway.
But the tree I really want in my backyard is The Magic Faraway Tree. I loved Enid Blyton’s story when I was growing up and always wanted to climb that tree to find out which cool land was at the top.
Well, that’s enough whimsy from Bryon Bay Writers Festival. I will return with a more serious post during the week.
Perhaps.
I’m off to Byron Bay Writers Festival 6.30 tomorrow morning. Can you hear my brain already screaming in protest? I am so not a morning person. Let’s hope I can function when I get there for the fab-sounding Nuts & Bolts seminar.
But first I found a poem today in one of my notebooks, aptly wedged between grocery lists:
dreams of youth
drifted away
squashed by the reality
of mundane
domestic unbliss
housework
telephone bills
grocery lists
time to dream again
in between
the coffee
and
the cornflakes
Yes, life has been rather mundane lately but going to Byron Bay (and taking my bat wings) is sure to cure that. Besides, I have a week and a half off work, I’m spending the next four days with my NVWG writing buddies, and then I have another week off. While many other lucky RWA members are heading to Brisvegas for this year’s conference, I’ll be doing the Clayton’s Conference, assisting Sandie Hudson and Rhian Cahill with the organisation and (shudder) giving a workshop on Writing Sex Scenes. In between all that, I’ll be editing both Beyond Happily Ever After (the 12 inch version – I mean, the 65k version) and also polishing up the first 3 chapters of Reality Check for the STALI contest.
I had hoped to post a blog each night from Bryon Bay and twitter frequently, but unless I hook into free wi-fi, that’s not going to happen. I made enquiries about getting mobile broadband with my ISP but that required a credit check despite the fact I’ve been a loyal customer for three years. To me, that just isn’t good customer service – it might be their customer policy but stuff that, the universe is telling me that I don’t need mobile broadband. Besides, it will only distract me from the writing and the editing. I will aim to write up a blog post each day regardless & post them to the blog when I get back. Maybe next year I will have prepaid mobile broadband. It’s just not going to happen this year.
So see you in five days, unless I see you in Byron Bay.
…until we hit the road and head up to Byron Bay Writers Festival.
The cabin is booked…the tickets are in my hot little hand…
The netbook is ready.
We drive up early Thursday morning so that Sue & I can attend the Nuts & Bolts workshop while Jen goes off to the Performance Poetry workshop.
The Nuts & Bolts workshop looks bumper-filled with information on the publishing process:
Action: mark Thursday 6 August all-day seminar Nuts and bolts for special attention. This brings together top industry professional bodies such as the Australia Council for the Arts, the Australian Society of Authors, Varuna the Writers House, plus editors, agents and publishers to give the plain unadulterated truth about how the business side of writing operates, what opportunities exist and how a manuscript progresses from agent to publisher to bookstore. You’ll also learn how creative writing courses assist emerging writers and we’ve included a weighty session on the pros and cons of self- publishing. This is an enormous amount of expertise and knowledge in one room, on one day, and to add even more value, attendees will receive three months’ total access to The Australian Writer’s Marketplace online.
Doesn’t that sound great?
That will more than make up for missing out on this year’s Romance Writers of Australia conference. I’ll be doing the Clayton’s Conference instead. Though, I do not plan on missing next year’s RomAus conference.
And when I return home, I have a whole week off work to make use of the writing mojo and finish the editing of Beyond Happily Ever After.
And there’s the opening night party, and the fabulous company of my writer friends.
Speaking of Romaus…we have a brand spanking new blog & I am the blogmistess with a fabulous team of bloggers. Should be fun.
And I got to see my sister & brother-in-law and their two gorgeous boys on the weekend. I even have photographic evidence right here:
Aren’t they so cute?
And as promised in my First Line Meme, here are the last lines of the same stories.
It’s up to you to decide what happens between the first line & the last line, though you can always read the book when it comes out or become one of my treasured beta readers.
Beyond Happily Ever After
And if just a glimpse of a happy ever after came, then that would be enough.
Diary of the Future
And that’s the way I like it.
Hold the Anchovies
And I’m going to continue moving on.
I’m with the Band
As the plane takes off, I can hear my heart singing.
Kissing Toads
A kiss with the promise of the future.
Making the Cut
Elizabeth liked being right.
Reality Check
“Just as long as you keep it real.”
Steph Bowe has already accepted my challenge and posted her Last Line meme here.
Meanwhile, I’ve been sick over the last four days with an URTI. Annoying bloody thing, can’t make up it’s mind whether it wants to be a head cold or something else so it has made anything but sleeping or vegging in front of the TV quite impossible. Went to the doctor today and got some antibiotics but also foolishly agreed to his suggestion of having a test for swine flu and whooping cough. Now, I don’ t know which test was which, but if you hear that suggestion, run the other way. You do not want foreign objects stuck up your nose.
The deadline for this competition is approaching and I have 20 pages plus to knock into shape. My paper manuscript is all kinds of colourful with so much splattering of red pen that Dexter would be proud.
My character Kirsty McInnes is getting upset that I’ve been spending all my editing focus on Cinderella, so she’s lured her hero Dylan Harrison onto Twitter, so they can both gang up on me. But it’s not going to work. I will meet this deadline. She insisted that Dylan needed a nice avatar, so that was another time suck:
Do you think they’ll make a cute couple?
They’re very quick to deny that they’re a couple, but that’s because they’re trying to keep it a secret.
Anyway, enough about Dylan & Kirsty, this is the couple I need to focus on for Friday’s deadline:
Cinderella:
and Prince Henry:
And, no, they will not be getting on Twitter. I’ve run out of email addresses.
