Thursday, March 31, 2011

A Round of Words: Goals

Hello, non-existent blog followers! It has been quite a while since I posed, but rest assured nothing monumental has happened since my last post. At least not to me.
But this coming month is the Round of Words in 80 Days challenge. I found out about this (earlier today...like an hour ago) from Claire Legrand's blog.

I do not know Claire Legrand, but I'm sure she will be thrilled to have her blog linked to and read by my multitudes of followers. Anyway that post kind of explains the whole idea about Round of Words in 80 Days (hereby referred to as ROW80) so I won't get into it in too much detail here. I will just say that I like the idea of it, because it is flexible and because it is personal. I have done NaNoWriMo in the past, and as a college student I'm just sadly not equipped with enough time to attempt it again anytime in the near future. But ROW80 is perfect, because I get to set my own goals and decide what I want to accomplish.

The only caveat to that is that I am meant to check in on my blog (here) every Wednesday and Sunday. This is good, because it means I will be utilizing this blog more often, which I should be anyway.

So, I guess now would be a good time to outline my goals for ROW80. I have done my best to keep them realistic, because I am in college and I do have about 4 more papers, not to mention finals, to contend with as well.

ROW80 Round 2 Goals:
1. Write (yet to be titled) short-story.
2. Write (at least) first 50,000 words of 1st draft of novel (also yet to be titled, affectionately referred to from here on out as Zombies!!. With two exclamation marks.
3. Not a separate goal, but to facilitate #s one and 2, I will set a weekly word goal of 5,00 words. This is just about 700 words a day (a little more), but I don't yet have to discipline to write every single day, so a weekly word count makes more sense for me. If I'm planning to write a short story of about 7,000 words (#1) and 50,000 words of novel (#2) then this works out perfectly. I have already written about 4,000 words of the novel. Just to make the parameters absolutely clear, the weekly/daily word count WILL count words written during planning/outlining stages. Mostly this just affects the short story, since I am almost nearly done with my outline for the novel.
4. Not technically a word challenge, but something I have wanted to start doing: take a picture every day. Of anything. Post said pictures to tumblr, facebook, etc.

So there you have it. My first ROW80 goals. I will be back in a week (Wednesday) to check in on how it's going. (ROW80 starts April 4 and runs until June 23.)