Sunday, November 9, 2014

Sunday Check-In (ROW80)

Hello, Everyone!
Well, it was super-chilly in Southern California for the Halloween/Dia de los Muertos weekend, and it rained, and I wore leggings and sweatshirts every day, and everyone around me craved soup (I’ve never seen a line at our favorite Vietnamese place before), and I pulled out more blankets to huddle under, and I missed my parents’ snuggly, warm, fluffy kitties.  The mountain near us was surrounded by thick, gray clouds, and sported the first gorgeously white snow-cover of the year. Much delicious tea and hot cocoa was drunk.
And then all of a sudden, mid-week, a switch flipped back, and it's been high-80’s again ever since (don’t hate us—you probably get gorgeous, *real* seasons, like autumnal foliage and super-green summers!   We do get oodles of warm weather, but we also get a lot of brown scenery and harsh, desert sun…). So now I’m back to getting overheated just sitting in front of the laptop, even with a glass of ice water to keep me company…

NaNoWriMo/DigiWriMo/ROW80 Goal Progress:
To remind you, "A Round of Words in 80 Days" is a goal-system where people publish small, attainable writing and life goals, and twice-weekly updates on said targets, over a period of 80 days.  A lot of the goals in this current 80-day block pertain to "National Novel Writing Month" and "Digital Writing Month," which are popular global challenges to write 50k words (a novel, blog posts, etc.) in the month of November.  See here for a brief overview, as well as links to all the websites.  

I'm still ahead on my ROW80 goals & behind on my NaNoWriMo/DigiWriMo 50k goal...However, if you count revisions for final blog posts, I have still been technically writing every day this month, which is a definite personal accomplishment (when I revised and published my Wednesday blog post, I only ended up netting about 290 words for the day...but it was still more than I had had that morning!).

Also, I taught Scrivener to recognize “vlog” and “blog” (and “NaNoWriMo,” and “DigiWriMo”) as valid words!

WRITING-SPECIFIC GOALS:
1. Blog Sketches: Still on a roll. It’s nice to be drawing regularly again—it’s the only way to keep your hand-eye coordination, and there isn’t a lot of pressure in making the doodles. I’m still trying to use some in every blog-post.  14 doodles and counting.
2. Blog Drafts (pre-writing 10+ blog posts for November & December): This is definitely the slowest part. I’m still easily distracted, so I'm only 2 posts ahead. And whenever I get a nice collection of blog entries, I get impatient to post them more frequently, which kind of defeats the purpose.  But it’s nice to be posting regularly, again—and these ROW80 updates and doodles are also giving me more ideas!
3. Vlog (scripts & shoots): I have not done anything new with my own project idea, but a friend and I did finally shoot a project we had been discussing.  See more below.
4. Creative Writing. I’m still not sure where I’m going with this, but a short character description that I wrote early in the week has slowly become three character descriptions and the beginnings of a story! I’ve adopted a couple plots from the NaNoWriMo Adoption Society, but I don't know how much I'll use either of them…

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ONGOING SOCIAL MEDIA/PERSONAL GOALS:
5. Tweet more Original Content/Reply to ROW80 comments.  Still trying to make more of my tweets contain my own words, even if it's just me quoting someone/something that strikes a chord or entertains me. The Twitter chats have become much-needed, fun social-time (Hello, Twitter-Buddies!). And I really appreciate the ROW80-ers who’ve given me feedback and encouragement, so I feel I ought to attempt the same.
6. NEW-ish: Exercise has been neglected this past week. I still need to do my daily stretches.  I also have a minimum personal goal of 3/3/3 that I need to get back to (3 sets each of counter push-offs, planks, and jumping jacks, for 3 days in a row).

What else?

It’s been fun to be doing this creative push—I really do get energy out of seeing other people being creative and pushing themselves. Watching Twitter and Facebook buddies posting daily during Inktober and Blogtober is really what propelled me into doing creative stuff this month in the first place. It’s so easy to forget, when you’re in an apathetic slump, that being creative spawns more energy and more creative ideas.

I’ve done a couple write-ins with friends, but I still haven’t decided if I want to participate in any of the organized meet-ups (several of the local libraries are supporting daily write-ins). It seems like it would be a strange social/anti-social crowd, a group of people at laptops companionably ignoring each other at best. But it would theoretically be helpful to have outside help with developing self-discipline/accountability.

I have noticed that I will definitely “avoid” one writing assignment (usually the creative writing one), to write a more simple thing (for example: this post was started on Wednesday night, while I was struggling with where to go next with my fiction project!).

A friend who is a NaNo-veteran commented to me mid-week that she didn't think I was "committed to writing a 50k novel," and so I automatically was unlikely to succeed.  I think she was correct.  But I am pleased that I've been knuckling down more and progressing steadily with my creative writing "idea" over the last six days, and it’s been nice to see my word count slowly approaching the NaNo minimums (I say "idea," because I don't exactly know where it's going, but I've been getting just enough inspiration to continue adding to it daily since I started it on November 4th). And I am happy with the prospect of a month’s-worth of writing, evenly split between blog and novella.
 
And finally: SLIME
Yesterday I got several cream pies to the face, and I got slimed.  Yes, really.  Eleven years ago, some friends and I had shot several short cream-pie skits, and this past year two of us had been knocking around the idea of a new script.  We finally set everything up and shot it on Friday.  There were several awkward dry runs (we could NOT remember our lines), but the shot itself went very smoothly.  By the end, I bore a slight resemblance to a gloppy She-Hulk.
 
My friend's containment-plan of a kiddy pool over a tarp worked quite well.  Here's a shot of me in the mid-clean-up phase.  I am attempting to shovel the slime into the smaller bucket--it was a relatively successful strategy, despite appearances!
Another shot from a bit later.  This one makes me think of She-Hulk at her side-job of professional painter:
All of the slime (cake batter and food-safe dye) did, in fact, wash out of these clothes!

Good luck to everyone this week, in your writing and crafting endeavors!

1 comment:

  1. Congrats on writing every day! That in itself is a great accomplishment! I too am DigiWriMo-ing. And behind, but we'll get there. Three weeks left! Happy writing this week!

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