Slowly ROWing along 2/20/12

This week was a bust.

I spent a lot of it reading webpages.  A lot.  More than I’ve ever done in my life.  I cleaned out my some of the bookmarks and tried to see where that little tidbit of information I’d gathered up before had hidden in the text and whether I still cared out it.  As “works in progress” go, I still have a lot more to do.  Like many things I’ve allowed to build up slowly over time, I grossly miscalculated the size of the task I’d set out before me.

A Thousand Prisms

However, I also tried to keep up with some of the pages of my fellow ROWers where I could.  Perhaps I’m enjoying the social element of this challenge a bit more than I should be, but I’m not sorry for that part.  I’m really having a great time.  And even with all the shifts in focus and near-misses on my goals, I am still getting things done.  I am writing–not the way I would like all the time (Flash Fiction pieces have taken more of a front seat than I would like), but I am writing creative pieces, not just stacks and stacks of notes to organize into greater works for later.

One of the more “writing related” pieces I ran across this week that struck a chord was this piece by Kait Nolan on why Contemporary Romance (CR) doesn’t work for her.  At a time when I’ve tried to understand why I nearly stopped reading fiction of any kind, this piece basically struck me like the proverbial ruler across the temple.  I like stories where I’m not sure who I should be rooting for (I say this even as I idolize series books and character driven pieces) or at least where the ending isn’t so obvious (or happy) that everyone gets what they hope for barring the antagonist.

Sometimes I like the antagonist to win.

But I like to write fiction.  I like romances…though I do shift a bit closer to the traditional concept of a romance of unrequited love and tragic heroes (yes, that’s probably a spoiler alert).  For example, I really loved the romance that developed between Susan Ivanova and Marcus Cole in Babylon 5 (watch the end of Season 4 if you don’t want to watch the whole series) far more than the romance that developed between Delenn and John Sheridan (though because of Sheridan’s being dead, that worked out well too).  Another example was when, in The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn finally achieves all that Elrond required of him so that he might wed Arwen, I was bummed.  It was only upon reading the

After the Dew

supplemental pieces where their deaths are upon the,, that I could truly appreciate how bittersweet their love was.

That made it all the more powerful and true.  And, as a classic fantasy, the levels of romance in LotR are just incredible anyway.  But that’s another story for another day.

So what does this mean for my check-in?

Well, it means I need to think about my writing in more serious terms.  It also means I need to devote more time to reading some fiction, and not just rereading old favorites.  I need to look more closely at stories I like and why.  I need to begin acting like I am in a literature class again.

Add in that so many things of this past week’s hiatus didn’t actually go on hiatus, plus this week is school vacation week (far more disruptive than summer break, because we’re able to settle into some useful patterns over the longer period)…  Well, I can’t stay on hiatus forever.  So I am reinstating my goals with new limits.

Writing and Editing:

• 500 words a day on my WiPs
• Typing 5 pages per week
• Edit 2 full pages a day
• prepare and post one full blog post per week on each of my blogs
• finish my beta read and get notes out by Friday

Social Media:

• #teamsprinty and #ROW80 word sprints at least 3 times a week
  

  I give you MORE Asparagus!

• check new blog posts1 (one) day a week–Thou shalt not live on the computer!
• stop Facebooking and other time killers after 1/2 hour once in morning; once at night
• exception– to return direct messages (I’ll still have email and Tweets on in the background)

Lifestyle:

• Get out of the house and enjoy life!
• Keep dancing!
• Take pictures
• Hug and savor my family…  especially my family.