hey!

hey out there! i figure i should say a little bit about myself before i start commenting wildly all over the blog….

my goal for this challenge will be three writing sessions a week. i’m not going to hold myself to a word count…yet. my job seems to somehow be very time demanding. 10 hours a day is generally my minimum unless i get crazy and leave a little early (woo!). i also am in school with about a 3/4 time work load. because of that, my weekend days are full of school work and most of my evenings are too. the ones that aren’t are generally spent in a heap on the sofa knitting and hanging out with real live people (sometimes i need to remind myself that social interaction is needed and that work doesn’t count! i stare at a computer all day and deal with big giant spreadsheets full of numbers). my number one focus, unfortunately has to be school at the moment, but if i can carve out 3 times a week where i can focus on my writing i will be immensely happy.

generally i have written short stories, poetry and creative non-fiction. poetry and non-fiction have definitely been my strongest draws over the years, although i think that might be because i have pressured myself and basically scared myself silly over fiction. i have this ideal in my head that i want to live up to and if the words that come out on the first try don’t meet up to that, well, then, obviously i suck. i have no idea what i want to write now – only that it needs to be done. the non-creative juices of my accounting life are making me feel unfulfilled and i want to come back to some of the creative places i know and love. i have no complete thoughts on a specific project, just a whole bunch of randomness bouncing around in my head. i suppose that one goal i might have would be to have concrete ideas and something solid started by the end of three months. there are a few submission deadlines that i’ve been eyeing that i could potentially actually make if i put my head down and focus. i will eventually have a link to some writing. at the moment i need to put my head back into a statistics text for an exam on friday night….

so that’s me! i’m really happy to be doing this – thanks rachael!
jen c

ps – i am very much enjoying that there is a category called “Angst”. maybe i should be posting this to there…because really, i’m already in the angst-ridden stage of this process….

One step closer

Well, I did my first 1,000 words today, and it felt good.

I haven’t introduced myself yet, so I wanted to post and say: If I can do it, you can too!

I’m 4 days overdue with Baby #2, and got a surprise yesterday when the doctor’s office called to say my induction is scheduled for Friday. You know, the day after tomorrow. It’s a little sooner than I had planned, and now I’m scrambling not to panic.

So to calm the mind and help me focus, I sat down today and put fingers to keypad and knocked out those 1,000 words while my husband and sister kept our 21-month-old son entertained. And it helped.

I signed up for this challenge because with having two kids under 2 at home, I need something that is just mine that restores me. With kids that age, of course their needs come first — they’re too cute to just let fend for themselves — but it’s hard day after day being consumed by the role of stay-at-home mom.

I’m lucky that I don’t have to work, but at the same time, I also have nothing else that defines me outside of motherhood. Well, I didn’t. But now I have this.

I want to be a writer, and I always have. I’m using this 36K Challenge to figure out if I can get out what I have always had bottled up inside. It’s time to do it or move on.

So good luck to everyone else out there. Let’s all cross the finish line together!

- Ginny 

Well, hello!

Look at all of you signed up! I’m so proud of y’all, putting pen to paper. What, you haven’t started yet? (Okay, me neither. But I have 3,000 words to write this week, so I really need to get cracking.)

So. Now that we’re all gathered here together, let’s talk. Tell us what you’re working on, what you want to accomplish with your goal. Tell us the best way to encourage you. Tell us your successes, tell us how you work, when you work, what works for you.

But please, a couple easy ground-rules:

1. Be nice. When you visit the site, leave at least one comment, if not more. Positive strokes are good.

2. Leave us a link if you want us to read your work (hosted elsewhere on your personal site, if you please), and let us know what kind of feedback you want, if any.

3. Write!

You know how we all are — as writers, we want nothing more than to write. To have written. But it’s the easiest thing to lose in the shuffle of life. So let’s do it together. Wheee!

- Rachael 

Ready to go!

Hey all! This really came as perfect timing for me, as I’d just been thinking it was time to get back to my half-finished novel from NaNoWriMo. I “won” NaNoWriMo, by crossing the 50,000 word mark, but ended up only about 2/3 of the way through my novel, and hopelessly struggling with all the problems my characters had managed to get themselves into. And I haven’t touched it since.

My commitment is going to be 3,000 words a week. I probably won’t be sticking to 3 sessions a week though–writing 1,000 words at one sitting is a bit much for me, so I’m going to try for 500 words a day, which seems do-able.

How are the rest of you tracking your words/commitment? I’ll probably create some sort of Excel spreadsheet. I used one for NaNoWriMo, and I like the instantaneous way it will add up word counts and let you know how much more you still need, or more optimistically, how much ahead you are!

Claire

Finally, some motivation!

Definitely need something like this! I’m working on editing a sci-fi novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo last year, and writing 2 short stories (the first is a mystery). My aim is three sessions a week, two editing and one writing. Got 300 words done for the first short story on Sunday, it’s for a class so I can’t write it all at once.

I’m an avoidance-aholic with my non-blog writing, I really need the extra help to get going.

AliHawke

Hurray! I’m in! Rachael, thank you so much for doing this.

I had the beginning and ending for my current big project, but unfortunately, very little to motivate me to fill in the blanks. That is, I had little to motivate me until now. I have 3000 some words down already from last week, but it’s the start of a new week and I need to get cracking.

Very excited to see what and how everyone else is doing

-Steph F.

Pencils ready!

Rachel, you have quite the triathlon going now. Knit/run/write!

Fortunately I am totally ready for this challenge, because I spent most of Saturday working on my characters and outline, and finally got everything hashed out properly. Now that I have the whole thing down, I feel like I have to WRITE FAST before I change my mind again!

Highly recommended: Orson Scott Card’s “Characters & Viewpoint.” Picked it up Friday on a friend’s recommendation, and it’s incredibly helpful, chock full of sound advice.

- Erika 

What Timing…

I’ve been trying to find my motivation recently. One of those confluence-of-events, life-prods things. So, my committment, as I don’t have a current Big Project, is three 15-minute writing exercises a week, to get the muscles back in shape, plus at least one writing journal entry a week, exploring ideas and such for a BP.

My usual genre is fantasy. What are other people working on/in?

- JudyLynn

36,000 Words, 3 Months

Hiya. I’m Rachael, and welcome to your new challenge. Ready?
36,000 words sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? 144 manuscript pages? But when you break it down to 1,000 words, three times a week, isn’t that something you can do?

Here’s where I am in all this: I can write a thousand, even two thousand words a day. But it’s regularity that I lack. Unless I’m doing Nanowrimo or something else that’s crazy and life-altering, it’s easy to push today’s writing to tomorrow. So three thousands words in a week, nah, that’s not that much. But it’s also so easy NOT to do, right? That’s the point.

So let’s write. I’m starting today, Sunday, March 11th. I am keeping track of my words planned and completed with a simple Google Calendar, and in 12 weeks, I’ll be 36,000 words richer. How ’bout you?

Join us here by leaving a comment (or by sending me an email at writeagogo@gmail.com) and I’ll send you an email telling you how to register as a user.

You’ll be able to blog here about what you’re doing, and HOW you’re doing it.

We’ll keep track of each other’s failures and successes (and just sitting down and getting ANY words on the page is a success, right?), and we’ll get more words down than we would have without this challenge, right?

Me, I’m writing 3000 words a week. You could write two poems a week. Or for four hours a week. I welcome you to go for the word-count with me, but it comes down to this:

Challenge yourself to do something you KNOW you can do reasonably, but aren’t doing right now. Then tell us your goal, and tell us the reward you plan to give yourself, and we’ll cheer you on. (This won’t be the place to post your work — you can do that on your own blog. But feel free to leave us a link to where we can find it!)

Now. Let’s go!