Raven's View

Trying to get these check in's done the day of, and preferably early. I'll be out doing a  lot of things in my "Other" category today so need to get rolling soon.

Speaking of "Other", the online course I'm doing - while interesting - has been a lot of work. The info said 6-8 hours a week - 16 is more like it. A lot more math than many of us had expected, and some confusing concepts to grasp. The videos are OK, but more examples - maybe as some supplementary notes - would help. Homework assignments often seem to be clever questions, not just a straight forward application. All to say - many falling behind and either dropping the homework part, or the whole course. A new direction for the university too, so was nice to see that they responded with a good compromise - they'll extend the homework deadlines from 1 week to 3 weeks. Gives us time to absorb things, and a bit of a Christmas buffer. 

Mid-week check:

• writing
  • Sunday and today's check in. 
  • Several FB rambles that could have become posts (note to self). 
  • Caught up on blogs about writing and publishing

My new plan was to do a todo list for the week, starting with Sunday. Looks like today's will be more a list of what was done today, then add the next six days.

I was going to go all hi-tech, synced between iPhone, iPad, and PC, dates and events in Google Calendar, goTasks on the iPad, daily journal in Evernote, all cleverly synced together over the interwebs. But I decided to use my artisan notebook instead. It's made in India with creamy pages that have a lovely texture. Writing with my black .5mm Pilot liquid ink pen. I just like the way they go together. Funny how picky we can be about our tools.

As in outlined in the last check in, I'm planning on using the general categories of Writing, Publishing, and Other. Writing being actually writing, plus reading blogs and books about it, as well as commenting on other's stories. Publishing will be taking it all to the next level - editing, finding likely targets for it all, publishing, travelling the world on book release parties - whatever it takes. Other? Well, the challenge will be to focus enough on the first two categories before the third consumes the whole day. Like today.

So - status update for last week:

This week's challenge from Terrible Minds was to write the end of a story. Here's the set up - 

This challenge is a strange one. It came to me (IN A DREAM okay not really in a dream) and I thought, “Well, that’s a bit curious, innit?” So, I figured I’d float it, see who grabbed hold.

I want you to write the last 1000 words of a non-existent novel.

In other words: “the ending.”

Now, you can be a bit meta with this — the ending in your mind may be a tidying up, a denouement, or you may instead choose to write a climactic end moment before imaginarily closing the curtains.

Also, those 1000 words are a loose set of guidelines. Could be 500, could be 1500 — whatever you need.

So, get to writing, folks.

Mine is a little short of the mark, at only a few hundred words, but it was hard to decide how much to include. I decided on less.

Read an interesting post by Krissy Brady about to-do lists for writers, called  "How to turn a to-do list into a to-done list. She raises some good points in it: do a weekly list and a daily list, order into categories and priorities, make sure they are actionable, etc. Check it out. 

With NaNoWriMo done I still have lots I'd like to be doing, but I need to corral all these ideas and initiatives. My overall goals are to become a successful author, get healthier, and enjoy life. The author part includes frequent writing challenges, blog posts like this one, learning more about writing via books, blogs, fiction, but it also needs a publishing focus, to go from writer to author. This will include editing my novels, sending out stories, and eventually publishing. The healthier part means better habits of exercise and eating. All the above should hopefully be some fun, but the enjoyment focus comes under Other too, and includes time with friends and family, music nights at my local, social media, following newspapers and newsletters online, doing online University courses, following a few good TV series, and trombone with a large band. Oh - and get ready for Christmas!

Obviously this is way more than fits in a day, so the solution I think is to schedule the must-do things, and let some of the others fill in as they may, things like 'check to see what's happening on Facebook'. I'll plan the week on Sunday, touch bases on Wednesday - both as part of ROW80 check in. As for what tools to use, other than these ROW80 updates, I can use GoTasks on my  iPhone5 (yay!), which syncs, sort of, with Google tasks, and gives reminders. Or use Evernote. Or a pen and paper journal.

So - here's my update since last check in - which apparently was not Sunday, but last week: