I'm not one to declare New Year resolutions, however, I think if I write my goals for 2008 publicly, it will encourage me to look at what I have done and what I need to do. I am one to beat myself up about what I did not do and what I should have accomplished by now. But it is a new year and no more shouldas, couldas, wouldas. I placed in a short fiction contest in summer of '06 and then I seem to have languised since then. I still have a glob of a novel that is seriously in need of revising big time and just have not touched it in almost a year. BUT it is not like I haven't been writing. I have been writing my family history with my genealogy writing group and expect to have a couple of those stories published in a family journal. And a publisher of local and family histories is interested in my writing about the area in Arkansas where my mom was born and raised. I also have had scholarly/academic work published in the last year in a Greenwwod Press encyclopedia and am in the process of writing a big piece for a peer review journal on romance writers that I feel strongly about.
Knowing I needed a jumpstart on getting back to my fiction, I attended a one day "Crazy Child Writing" workshop one Saturday in early December. I wrote twenty-five pages in long hand on a new novel that I am excited about. But I am about to set my goals and one of them is to attend a revision workshop and or make the sacrifice and get a writing coach/developmental coach to get my first novel finished because the second one is really grabbing me. My problem is discipline and sticking to one thing and I need to correct that. Unfortunately I cannot chew gum and walk at the same time. LOL.
In the last six months several women have come into my life who have expressed a need to write or restart writing and I think I have the makings of a group of sisters where we can meet monthly or whenever and write freely and safely and who knows what can happen. So that is a goal. I have a few more days before I go back to work and I am taking myself on a little mini-retreat, checking into a nice hotel about 30 miles away while the storm comes into night and raining the next few days. I will be transferring my new storyline from paper to my new laptop and mapping out my 2008 writing goals. Whew, that felt good just getting this out.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Hey Dera! I'll be here checking you out and cheering you on. You know I am so feeling you. Here's to you and doing the darn thing in the 08!!
Dera,
You'll have to attend my online writer's conference. It's a steal at $10 and the authors are really some of the best.
See details on my blog.
Thanks!
I meant to add, I may the promise to myself in 2007 that I would not let another year go by without finishing and sending my manuscript out. Well I wrote the last 42,000 words by May and put it in the mail to a publisher by mid may. I sent it to another in September. By the end of the year I had a book deal. Now I'm trying to write book two.
My advice, keep your committments to yourself. Don't let anything interfere or the years will keep passing you buy.
Thanks for your thoughtfulness and your encouragement Rhonda. What a testimony you have. And you are so right, time will pass you by.
Post a Comment