Hello, writers. Happy New Year. Write On! turned nine years old on Monday, old enough to Fly Up from Brownies to Girl Scouts. A salute to those who have been here since the beginning and still show up, and another to those who joined us more recently.
Many of the quondam regulars have wandered off, although I hear good things. I’m just glad they got something out of the series that perhaps helped them in moving on to the next step in their writing lives.
Anyway, glad to have you here.
Daily Kos Writing Month is under way. Below are the goals people have set themselves for the month. If you want your goal added to the list, please let me know. If you’re already on the list, feel free to give us a progress report. I’ll keep updating progress reports till 10 pm eastern (or till the power goes out) and after that they’ll go in next week’s diary.
Many of the goals listed below are summaries of your descriptions, so if I got it all wrong let me know.
DaKoWriMo Goals
Back Porch philosopher
Dust off a short story, improve its ending, and submit it to a magazine.
bonetti
Spend 31 hours on revising NaNoWriMo project.
As of 1-4-18 has revised for 4 hours.
Clio2
Freewrite 800 words a day, for a total of 24,800.
As of 1-4-18, 4,261 words freewritten.
Eihenutu
Will finish rough draft of memoir.
Grouchy Squirrel
25,000 words.
787 words as of 1-4-18.
Leo Orionis
Dig up and finish partially written short stories to complete a short story collection.
As of 1-4-18, 11 poems & 11 stories planned; 10 poems and 3 stories completely done.
mettlefatigue
Continue writing semi-autobiographical fantasy novel, while also working on revising.
Mercy Ormont
Get as far as possible in working on memoir.
Mnemosyne
Add 35,000 words to work-in-progress.
As of 1-4-18, about 3k words added.
reppa
Plan and expand on a half dozen ideas to see what they turn into.
RiveroftheWest
Add 15,500 words, plus two to three drawings a week, to history/fantasy work-in-progress.
SensibleShoes
Fifth revision of fantasy novel.
As of 1-4-17, have annoted 3 critique letters, done some brainstorming with bubble maps, and written plan for revision.
strawbale
Write out a reasoned argument, with references, about a problem with an assumption in astronomy.
As of 1-4-17, has gathered & reviewed sources, organized downloads, and has the beginnings of an outline.
Give us an update. Let us know how it’s going.
By the way, someone mentioned last week that their project was hard to quantify. Is yours? If you don’t have a wordcount to shoot for, what will you shoot for?
I shoot for 2 hours on task each day no matter what. And now, through lack of planning I’ve run out of time to write anything else in this week’s diary before turning off the internet for those mandatory 2 hours. So I’ll have to save this week’s topic for next week. :-/
Meanwhile, tonight’s challenge:
Choose an object from your work-in-progress. A thing. A very big thing; it should be bigger than a bread box and ideally bigger than a house. Free write about it for five minutes— don’t stop writing.
Share as much or as little of the result as you want.
Write On! will be a regular weekly diary (Thursdays 8 pm Eastern Time, 5 pm Pacific) until it isn't.
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