Week 3 Plan

This week's to-do's:
1: Grade one class's worth of final drafts
2: Make handout for Eng. 102's project 2
3: Taking photos of earrings
4: Take car to the shop
5: Grade second class's worth of final drafts
6: Grade third class's worth of final drafts
7: Submit one story for publication
Bonus: Cookies!

Week 2 Amendment

I had a realization about daily goals. They need to be flexible. It's silly to have time on one day to do the next day's thing, but put it off because it's the next day's thing. I know it seems obvious, but it took me a while to figure that one out.

This week, I'm not going to worry so much about strict adherence to which day something gets done on (with the exception that certain things, by their nature, should not be pushed back). I think it'll make the experiment more realistic.

Unfortunately, I'm starting off this week without my first thing - coffee w/the pirates - done. But, that was totally the weather's fault and not my own. Crazy Colorado winter. Today, of course, it's sunny and the snow's melting and the roads will be perfectly fine by the evening. At least that means my students in the two classes I have today shouldn't be using weather as a reason for being absent.

On To Week 2

My first week of having daily goals went okay. I was kind of spotty on hitting all the goals, but it was nice to have something to try for each day. Overall, I got some things done I wouldn't have otherwise.

For the second week of the experiment, here's what I'm aiming for.
Monday: Pirates' meeting
Tuesday: Finish grading 102 rough drafts
Wednesday: Finalize plan for 102's second major paper
Thursday: Make a pair of earrings
Friday: Goof off
Saturday: Library run to swap out reading materials
Sunday: Submit story for publication
Floating Goal: Bake a batch of cookies

Thing a Day

I've got to be honest, I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed recently. I feel like my to-do list is too large scale. Now, since it often helps during these times if I focus, if I break things into chunks, I'm going to do exactly that as my challenge for this month. I'm going to look at what I want to do and make it into really, really little parts. Then I get more check marks on my list and a clearer sense of making progress.

For February, I'm going to plan a week at a time and give myself a list of at least one specific thing to do each day. 28 days = 28 goals. They won't all be writing goals, but I'll be aiming to get a check mark every day. Depending on the week, I'm also going to have one or two floating/bonus goals.

Without further ado, here's this week.

• Monday: Meet with Cindy and send my thesis to Forth Collins. (first check mark of the week!)
• Tuesday: Grade all pending homework for my classes and prepare peer review forms for their first project.
• Wednesday: Finish typing up my latest story.
• Thursday: Go to poetry reading on campus.
• Friday: Grade at least one class's rough drafts.
• Saturday: Submit a story for publication.
• Sunday: Take photos of earrings I've made recently.
• Floating goal: Do a total of 9 miles on the elliptical at the gym this week.

Are you up for joining me?

Out Like a Lamb? March Summation.

The new laptop is working a treat. Definitely my favorite toy for the year. My Cass word count is around 33,000 right now, which makes me happy.

My weekly three-tiered to do list plan was useful in that it jarred me out of an unproductive rut, but I never got to the point of being fully engaged in it. The most helpful part of it was having specific, measurable goals each day. That's the part I'm going to keep up with.

New plan - scrap the printed out weekly calendar in favor of a whiteboard on the fridge that's more easily modifiable and interactive.

My productivity plan for March ultimately had partial success and while the results aren't wildly amazing, the overall results aren't too shabby. How'd your month go?

The End Of The Scheduled Week

My highly-structured schedule sort of worked this week. I got some things done I wouldn't have otherwise, but I fell short of my non-negotiables more than one day. It was good, though, because it illustrated the difference between what I thought should happen each day and what tended to really happen.

In light of this, I'm going to do another 3 level week with some adjustments. Less "X will happen on Tuesday" and more "X, Y, or Z will happen on Tuesday."

I've got to say, even though I didn't get done everything I wanted to, it was still very satisfying to mark something off my list on the fridge. That's the best part of TO DO lists.

New To-Do List Plan

This week went okay in terms of productivity. I did get a few things done, but it wasn't much above and beyond the things I get done any other week. So, I decided to change my strategy.

I just printed out a plan for the week. This plan is broken down in two ways: by day, and by levels. I'm falling back on a technique I learned doing sales. The idea was that for each goal you set for yourself, you create three levels:

1. Must do - this is the non-negotiable, bare minimum level. If I do nothing else, I WILL do this on that day.

2. Should do - this is what I should reasonably be able to do on that day.

3. Could do - this is the one where, if I'm really on my game, I can achieve.

Each level builds on the one that came before and I've got it all worked out on a spreadsheet stuck on my fridge. The funny thing about it all is that once I put it all on the page, it really doesn't seem like much. I've also built in some catch up in my goals toward the end of the week to help fill in the gaps if I need to. It's all doable, it's just about a greater level of structure. I'm feeling good about it.

This time next week, assuming I stay on the plan and get done what I want to, I'll be feeling really good about it.

Honeymoon Edits

Friday:
1:30-1:45
Started typing up handwritten revisions for "The Honeymoon of Mr. and Mrs. Roux"

Saturday:
11-ish, downloaded a couple of albums from Amazon as a bribe for working on revisions - A Horse of a Different Color by Big & Rich and Always Got Tonight by Chris Isaak.

11:45-12:05
Continued work on Honeymoon.

12:05-12:10
Short break to reassure Sherman that the roofers next door are not, in fact, the devil and that she can stop barking at them any old time at all, or even sooner. When that didn't work, I opened the blinds in my office to make a nice sunny patch on the floor for her to lay in. This worked.

12:10-1:20
More Honeymoon.

Catch Up Weekend

I was doing well with my 20 minutes a day goal, but this week it fell apart. Between the lead-up weekend with David & Christopher Moore and starting the week off with a CWC meeting, I was already pretty worn out to start with. Then throw in a sudden meeting for the composition department and substituting today and, well, I've been busy.

My total this week so far is about half an hour, if I count writing a letter as part of my writing time. So, while Deb is taking the weekend off to recharge her creative batteries, I'll be taking the weekend on to catch up with my goal.

Stupid Deb, with her break, and stupid Jenny with being finished. Bastards. (I say that with love.)

Soon To Be 2009

Not only am I wrapping up another month today, I'm wrapping up a whole year. Shoot, that's a lot.

This year I started teaching, got a dog, joined the CWC, started the bar novel, stopped working at the bar, started the Cass stories, and wrote about eight of my ten thesis stories. I've been busy.

This month, my whole thing was to break out of my usual routine. Between being on break from school and revising my thesis, I've managed that in spades. I've never been a huge fan of revising, but now I'm getting over some of my intimidation, thanks to going through about 100 pages to revise them over the weekend. Whew, that was crazy.

Also this year, I've had a couple of firsts. This year, during the bet with John, I wrote more words in fewer days than I ever have before. During this past weekend, I undertook the single-most massive revision ever. The thesis is the longest cohesive project I've ever finished a full draft of.

So, while I haven't gotten the big book deal, or cured cancer, I think it was a pretty good year. I pushed or crossed a lot of boundaries, and once you do a thing the first time, it becomes easier to do it again. That makes me optimistic.

Here's hoping you all can also find many things to be proud of from 2008.

And now, on to 2009.

600 Words

The bet ended today. Sadly, John beat me. Not by much, though, which I like.

Other things I like:
- This is a new personal best for me - it opens up a whole new standard for what I'm capable of.
- I not only reached my goal of 50 pages, I smashed right through it.
- I'm now ahead of schedule on my thesis.
- Tomorrow I get to go to my thesis meeting with Juan and tell him that I didn't write 50 pages like I planned, I wrote almost 80.
- I hit the point, a few days ago, where I was worn out and low on inspiration and really feeling like I'd reached my limit, and I pushed myself through it.

Without the bet, I'd have almost 30 fewer pages than I do right now. I may not have won, but all-in-all, it was worth one dinner.

Cheers, John.

Ah, Deadline, Maker of Momentum

In order to fulfill my goal of getting the thesis over and done with by the end of the semester, I pretty much have to have it all written and revised by November 14. This means I need to have the fiction part written, the research done for the theoretical preface, and the theoretical preface written. All-in-all, we're talking at least one hundred pages.

Not just one hundred pages written out, either. One hundred pages that have been written, edited, distributed to my thesis committee, and revised in response to their feedback.

All this, in two months. Most folks I know are taking two semesters to work out their thesis. But, that's why I wrote stories ahead of time, right? Right. Now it's crunch time. Juan wants pages every time we meet, and I'm quickly running out of material I wrote over the summer. The cool thing, though, is that where for a while I had stalled out on ideas for stories, all of a sudden, I'm prolific. I've got the first page/paragraph of three added into the thesis to work on, and I'm thinking I might toss in a flash I wrote out completely the other day. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, that flash fits right in with one of the new ones...

Oh yeah, and I'm due for 50 more pages for the CWC in two weeks, without having made any noteable progress at all after I did that spurt of 15 pages. Thus, I'm thinking I'll switch my CWC project back to thesis and kill the proverbial two birds, etc.

Of course, this means I have even more pages to write to get the thesis up to a 50 page sub. than I would have to do the same for the novel, but that also means I'll be that much closer to getting my MA when I want to.

A Word In My Defense

I just want it on-record that though I've been lagging on page count, it hasn't been purely all procrastination. The past week-ish has actually been pretty busy for me. I picked up an extra night at the bar (aka more research for the novel), currently have out-of-town relatives visiting, and had various other activities, including:

Getting ready for and attending my dad's retirement party (no birthday was involved whatsoever, the decorator was just delusional).


Going up to the mountains with dad over the weekend.


Tackling some cleaning around the house and especially in my office, where I've been depositing my horde of binders (note the big box) and gradually running out of storage space and thus resorting to use of the floor. (Dog included for scale)


I've also been refining my new polymer bead style and adding additional, and even more labor-intensive steps to how I make them. Now, along with all the other steps, I'm sanding too.

So, no, I haven't been keeping up with my 2+ pages a day writing goal, but it's not like I've been an absolute slacker, either.

Style Recap

For as long as June lasted, July went by all blurry-like.

My biggest thing this month was feeling sick of the sound of my narrative voice. So, I proposed a switch-up. My original thought was to pull out a short story from another author, analyze it a bit, and then write one of my own in imitation of their style. It's an exercise I've done in the past with good results.

Never happened.

Instead, I did something impulsive and started a novel. After all, the narrative style of a novel is different from that of a short story, and I am in a novel-writing group, so it seemed fitting. I have to say, I'm pleased with how that went. My narrative voice was different, and I fell out of the patterns I had gotten into with my short stories (or, at least, I fell out of the patterns I was aware of).

My prose was different and more interesting to write because of it. Not exactly what I intended by picking July's challenge, but the end result came out about the same. I call that a win.

How'd you do this month?

The Power of Fries

Whew, I made my goal, plus a page or two. It's off to dinner I go!

The Easy Part, the Hard Part

This time last week I was in panic mode. 50 pages, two weeks, how was I ever going to pull it off? Tonight, after averaging out pretty well on my 3.25 pages a day goal, I sit at 33 pages of rough draft.

My many years of English Majoring are paying off. All that paper writing (usually at the last minute) has gotten me pretty practiced at producing quickly. I've had lots of practice getting my thoughts in gear fast and, thanks to typing classes in middle school, my fingers are good at keeping up.

All the time spent working on Oracle is paying off, because through it I finally got a feeling for how to write the pacing and general architecture of a novel.

My many, many blog posts on my bar blog gave me architecture for writing bar scenes, and since I'm so practiced with that kind of tone, the bar scenes are proving easy to write out.

Then, there's the part where my procrastination means I have to write a few pages every day or face sad, sad defeat. The upshot of this is that it's gotten me into a rhythm, it's built momentum.

Of course, those are the easy bits.

There are hard bits too. Thanks to the pace at which I'm writing, my rough draft is pretty sketchy. I already have scenes I know I'll have to go back and flesh out before Monday, which will take more time on top of the pure hit-50-pages time, though it'll also add a few pages to my final count.

The worst, and most unexpected part, is that while I'm having such an easy time writing the bar stuff, I'm having a hard time writing the stuff where the main character is not at the bar. The bar's easy, so many coworkers and/or customers to play Jess off of. Once she's clocked out, I start coming up blank. A little problem, to say the least, and I've got a very limited amount of time to solve it.

And Then There Were 25

The fun part about goals is when you get so close to the end of one that you can't help but push just a little bit more to reach it early.

Tonight I made it to twenty four pages, which was the end of a chapter, 3.25 new pages for the night, and a good stopping place.

But, come on, how could I really stop just one page short of a milestone? That's right, baby, 25 total to finish the night. I think I need some celebratory ice cream.

Just About Not April Any More

This was one of the fast months. I did a lot and made some progress on various projects. I'm liking the "Done" list. I think I'll keep it. That sucker got pretty long this month.

My main goal for this month was playing around with office supplies and getting my thesis organized and all in one place. Not a monumental task, but an important one. I got that done, and I'm glad of it. It's been more hit-and-miss keeping up with my out-of-the-house pages, but I'm not too disappointed by that. It's been a busy month and the last time I made it to the coffee shop with my notebook, I wasn't able to focus enough to get anything done any way. Otherwise though: productive.

March Summary

As so often happens, the plans I make at the beginning of the month have turned and changed through the course of the weeks. At the beginning of March, I set out to read poetry. Now, at the end, I've not read any. Oops.

However, I did read a novel, which is something I haven't done in some time. Also, by way of reading something other than my norm - a few days ago I pulled my violin out of my folks' basement, tuned it up, and saw what I could remember. I also picked up some sheet music from the library. Thus, while my plan was to read poetry, I've ended up reading music. Not what I had planned, but it's still reading something other than what I've been. I call it a win.

Conversations

"How are the thesis stories coming along? Or are you playing since it's spring break?"
-Deb

This week I've chatted with both Deb and Jenny about the thesis. In response to Deb's question, I said I'd written one complete thesis story and developed ideas for two more. Actually, now I've got ideas for three more. It's exciting. It's also funny that I didn't realize how much I'd gotten done until I told her. That's when I had my moment of "Hey, look at that."

With Jenny, we talked not only about the thesis, but also about the writers group. I've been thinking for a while now that maybe it's time to pull out. I find myself spending more and more time on other people's writing and less and less time on my own.

Then I got "A friendly reminder from your friendly neighborhood VP" e-mail from John. He seems to think that since my group dues are due, I ought to hand over money. Crazy.

Thus, we arrive at this morning and two decisions.
1. I'm withdrawing from the formal group and going to just do The Pirates now.
2. I'm shifting my approach to my goals this month.

We'll see how it goes.