Building Discipline and ROW80 Goals

I got into a discussion with my crit partner Susan Bischoff last week, who remarked that I was the only person she knew that, were I to be able to quit my job to write full time, actually would write full time.  After a bit of thought, I decided she was probably right.  The vast majority of people would be well intentioned.  They think, “Oh, if I could just quit my job, I could put out 3 or 4 books a year!”  And then that glorious day would happen, and those people, in the absence of the structure of an Evil Day Job work day, would wind up frittering away all of their time on Twitter or Pinterest or blogging or TV or any of the 875,000 things we love to do to procrastinate.  They might even write less WITHOUT the job than they did WITH the job.  Because they mistakenly think “Oh I have all day instead of just that hour before dinner,” and then their day gets filled up with other stuff, mostly crap, and then they’re left at the end of the day wondering where their time went.

 

This is the funny thing about time.  It has a habit of always being full, no matter how much or how little you need to cram into a frame.

 

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

The simple fact of the matter is that it isn’t enough to want to write full time.  If you don’t take the time and make the effort to develop DISCIPLINE and good habits BEFORE you quit your job, you aren’t going to have discipline or good habits after.  This is part of what ROW80 is about.  I want to help you develop that discipline and establish those good habits in your every day life.  I want to help you take YOURSELF seriously as a writer, treat YOURSELF as a professional, so that that bracket of time you can devote to writing, be it an hour or a day, becomes set in your mind as Writing Time–something you protect with the fierceness of a honey badger.  Because here’s the thing–when you’re self employed and most ESPECIALLY when you are a writer, people will not take you seriously unless you make them.  They see what you do as a hobby, not a means of making a living, and assume you can drop what you’re doing to do whatever darn thing they want because it’s no big deal.  You’re self employed and can set your own hours.  Or even, dare I say it, that it’s just not that important because it isn’t like a Real Job.  Yep the morons of the non-creative world think that.  Some of them anyway.

So Susan is absolutely right.  If I’m ever able to quit my day job, I actually will write full time.  I already have a pretty good idea of exactly how my daily schedule will go (because job or no, I am a schedule-happy person).  And it will work because I have spent years developing the discipline to make it work.

I want that for all of you.  I want you to get comfortable with that discipline, with protecting your Writing Time.  So give some thought to that as you make your goals for this Round.  What kind of good habits to you want to establish?  What sort of discipline do you need to work on?

 

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Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list of other intrepid ROWers…  You may notice that an email address is now required on the linky.  As a point of explanation, I don’t have any intention of DOING anything with you email address, it just tends to cut down on the number of random spam links (which were a new occurrence last round).

 

ROWers ACTIVATE! It’s TIME FOR ROUND 2!!!!

GO GO GO! Voting is live at DABWAHA for Round 2 where I face off against VERONICA ROTH! Let’s give her a run for her money!

It’s happening from

MIDNIGHT until NOON CST

Be sure to go cast your vote from every IP address, computer, or phone you can find! Let’s show ‘em what our network is made of!

#TeamKait!

Calling All ROWers! Voting TODAY for DABWAHA!

Calling all ROWers, friends, readers, and fans! Today is THE DAY! (I’m excited, you’re just going to have to deal with all the capslockiness and exclamation points)

Voting between Red and Kendare Blake’s Anna Dressed In Blood begins at 12 noon EST CST (THIS HAS BEEN UPDATED) and runs until midnight EST CST.

We have 12 hours to do this, y’all.

I am, predictably, on the road for the Evil Day Job (they have no respect for my need to stage a coup today), so I am COUNTING on all of you to help spread the word and get folks TO THE DABWAHA SITE and VOTING between 12 and 12. Remember, this all happens TODAY, March 15th from 12 NOON EST CST until 12 MIDNIGHT EST CST. You’ll be seeing tweets and FB posts and assorted other stuff I was able to schedule in advance. Feel free to RT, reblog, repost, or just poke people with a cattle prod to get them to the polls!

LET’S GO TO THE MATTRESSES!

#TEAMKAIT

Unscheduled Announcement By Your Fearless Leader

Okay, so this has nothing to do with normal operations here at ROW80.  But I started ROW80 as a community of other writers to help support each other through all the trials, tribulations, and joys of the writing life.  It’s grown by leaps and bounds over the last year and I’ve met so many awesome and wonderful people.  And lest you think this is leading up to some announcement that I’ve had something awful happen and I’m shutting down the site, FEAR NOT.  We are not going anywhere.

WE ARE HERE TO TALK ABOUT THE JOY STUFF!

So unless you were living under a rock (or were, you know, not online yesterday), you probably saw the news flying by on Twitter that my YA debut Red was nominated as a finalist for DABWAHA.

For those of you not in the know, DABWAHA is the Dear Author Bitchery Writing Award for Hellagood Authors.  Every March Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and Dear Author team up to present a Final Four Style Tourney for books.  Same kind of concept as basketball but with votes instead of an actual game.  From the DABWAHA website:

We’ll put out a slate of 64 picks.  8 categories and 8 books in each category.  In each category, the books are seeded 1-8.  The books then face off against one another with book 8 going up against book 1, book 7 going up against book 2, book 6 going up against book 3.  And so on and so forth.

The books compete against each other through the use of a poll and readers pick which book is going to win.

This would be awesome under any circumstances.  The nomination is beyond epic because, as far as I can tell, I am the only indie author in the field.  :GULP:

Now I’m up against Rae Carson and Veronica Roth (among others), so I know I’m not going to win my category.  I’m just NOT THAT WELL KNOWN.  As I said before, it’s a total honor just to be nominated.

But let’s face it.  I’ve got a competitive nature.  :mischievous gleam:

I think with the support of the awesome people of my networks, I might possibly stand a chance of at least making it out of the first bracket (assuming it’s not Rae or Veronica I’m immediately matched up against).  That’s where you come in.  I mean, seriously, what is the point of building a community if you can’t mobilize them?

So ROWers I am ISSUING A CALL TO ARMS (or, you know, to vote).

There are a lot of steps to this depending on how things go, so I have created a brand-spanking new, special DABWAHA Newsletter that you can sign up for to be notified of what to do where and when.  This is separate from the ROW80 posts to your inbox.  And it’s separate from my normal newsletter (if you happened to be signed up for it).  I normally only send out newsletters when there’s a new release (so a couple times a year).  The DABWAHA Newsletter is a time-limited campaign that will involve periodic blasts over the next 2 weeks.  I promise, I’m not normally all up in your inbox.  Once the DABWAHA Tourney is over, the emails will stop.  Remember, this is totally separate from my normal newsletter, so if you still want to receive notices of new releases and, you know, news, be sure you’re signed up here (for the regular newsletter).

Now, you don’t actually get anything out of this.  I don’t have prizes or anything (that would be considered bribery, which would be very unsportsmanlike).  All you get out of this is a chance to earn my undying gratitude and an opportunity to help me try and show up the big girls.  Let’s show ‘em Red is the Little Indie (Book) That Could!

Between now and March 13th, you can help by ENTERING YOUR PICKS per the instructions here on the DABWAHA website.

Feel free to tweet, FB, share, reblog, or flag down total strangers to squee.  Whatever you gotta do to share.  And don’t forget to sign up for the DABWAHA Newsletter!

The Test “Mile” and Goals

Each round here at ROW80, I always start off either talking about or directing y’all to my post on sustainable change.  I am a big big fan of teaching you to set goals that are realistic and attainable, goals that will fit into your life–whether that means you set them that way straight out of the gate or have to adapt as we go along through the round.  Either way’s fine.  The point is that you GET IT, do it, and get that boost of meeting your goals that helps you stick to them.

I want to talk about something a bit different this go round.

I am not a runner.  I have, at varying points in my life, tried to be.  For one stretch of college, I actually pulled it off, regularly running 2-3 miles a day.  But I have a very old knee injury that precludes me from really doing it, and frankly, I really hate running compared to other forms of aerobic exercise (not near enough payoff for the gasping, wheezing torture of the process).  But I did pick up one incredibly valuable concept from running, and that is the idea of the Test Mile.

There’s this notion among runners that even if you feel like utter crap, you should still get out there and do a Test Mile.  By the end of that mile you’ll know whether or not you need to stop because you still feel like crap.  Most likely, you’ll have pushed through the UGH and will go on to finish the rest of your run and feel better for it (Note: On a health and fitness front, same applies–you will never regret a workout).

I want to challenge each of you to set a Test Mile for your writing.  It’ll be different for everybody, given our wide variations in productivity.  But the thing is, we all have massive demands on our time.  Unavoidable stuff like doing our jobs, taking care of our families, partaking in other social obligations.  And then there’s the stuff we WANT to do.  Catch up on DVR.  Read a good book.  SLEEP.  In modern society we often operate on overload, constantly pushing ourselves until we’re cranky, tired, and the last thing we want to do is sit our Butt In Chair, Hands on Keyboard.

Do it anyway.

I encourage you, this round, each and every day, to sit down an write your Test Mile.  Whatever that is.  For me, that’s 500 words.  That’s my comfort zone, something I can usually rip out no matter how lousy I feel or distracted I am.  For you that might be 250 or even 100 words.  It might be 1,000 (in which case, you’re very lucky and should totally let the rest of us in on your secret).  Whatever your Test Mile is, sit your butt down and write it.  Even if you don’t get beyond it.  Even if every syllable blows chunks, that’s words, that’s practice, and that keeps your brain more properly oiled for the next time, when you’ll sit your butt down and totally kill it.

So write up your goals in a blog post (be sure your blog is not set to private or no one can actually visit you to leave encouragement) and link to it in the linky below (that thing that says “Click here”), NOT in the comments section.  Be sure to link directly to the individual post, not the main blog page.  And if you need to change your goals as we get further into the round, that’s totally kosher around here.  The key is to keep pushing forward and not quit, and focus on the positive progress you do make instead of what you perceive as failures.

Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list of other ROW80 participants’ goals…

~*~

Kait Nolan

A Year of Rocking The ROW!

We’re drawing to the end of a marvelous inaugural year here at A Round of Words in 80 Days.  I started this challenge because I was tired of the one size fits all nature of all the other challenges out there and I wanted something where I could set my own goal and adjust it as life blew up in my face (as it often does) and the support of other writers to get me through the rough patches and encourage (or horsewhip) me into producivity.  Over each of the four rounds this year, our community has grown.  By now many nascent writing challenges have disappeared (oh 70 Days of Sweat, where are you? Evidently your domain has lapsed.).  ROW80 shows no signs of waning.  More and more writers join us with each round, retreating from universal goals and embracing the idea that goals are personal and that it’s better to tailor to suit your own life and celebrate those successes, than to strive for the unrealistic and wallow in failure.  Because being a writer is not about “winning” some arbitrary challenge.  It’s about fitting writing into your life each and every day throughout the year, project after project.  That’s what being a professional is all about.

So if you didn’t happen to quite make your goals, celebrate what progress you did make.  You’re ahead of those who never even started.  And maybe you’ve learned something about what constitutes a manageable goal for you.  Once we finish up Round 4, enjoy your holiday!  But be sure to come back here and join us on January 2nd for Round 1 of 2012!  It’s going to be a year of success!

And if you’ve got a hankering to be a sponsor, I’ve still got 4 slots left, we’re full up for Round 1, but I’m happy to put you on the list for Round 2.  Check out the FAQs above and dash me an email at kaitnolanwriter (at) gmail (dot) com.

Rockin’ The ROW Winner!

So you may recall that at the beginning of Round 4 we kicked off with the fabulous Rock the ROW twitter party.  There was, in fact, a photo competition for which the prizes were ebook copies of the following:

Kait Nolan’s Red, Susan Bischoff’s Hush Money and Heroes Til Curfew, Lauralynn Elliott’s Dark Relic: Vampire’s Curse, Claudia Lefeve’s Parallel, Cate Morgan’s Brighid’s Cross, Stacey Wallace Benefiel’s The Toilet Business, and Vicki Keire’s Gifts of the Blood and Darkness in the Blood.

>.>

I kinda totally forgot to post the winners.

:ducks:

Sorry, y’all!  It got busy!  Thanks, Jenny, for reminding me.  But anyway, without further ado, here are the poll results where you, fabulous ROWers voted on your favorite Rockin The ROW photos.

First place by a landslide is Natalie Hardford and her guitar.

Second is Barbara McDowell planking (my personal favorite).

Third is a tie between Lena Corazon and Tia Bach (and also technically Barbara again but since she won second we’re gonna strike her from the three way tie).

So here’s how this is gonna work.  We have 7 prizes (okay yeah there are 9 books but Hush Money and Heroes Til Curfew go together, as do Gifts of the Blood and Darkness In the Blood, so we’re gonna count those as sets).  First place winner gets to pick 3.  Second picks 2 from what’s left.  And the third place winners each get 1.

Winners, dash me an email at kaitnolanwriter (at) gmail (dot) com and we’ll start getting prizes sorted out.  Authors donating prizes, dash me an email with the relevant coupon codes for your book.

Thanks everybody for Rockin’ the ROW and making Round 4 such a superb success!

Some ROW80 Site Changes

Since we continue to have increased traffic to the blog and people showing up after Rounds have begun, I have made a change to the structure of the ROW80 website such that the direct address (http://aroundofwordsin80days.wordpress.com) takes you to a static page that describes briefly what the challenge is and what the rules are.  Obviously we want to answer the questions for new peeps, but I wanted to make it easier for them to find the information they really need on the front end.

The main ROW80 blog can now be found under the heading “Blog” (I know, it’s revolutionary), which you’ll see in the menu bar at the top of your screen.

I’m also trying to make the page less busy, so I’ve moved to a 2 column instead of 3 column layout.  Same info is still there, you just may have to scroll down a little bit to see it.

Don’t forget to make your final check in for Round 3!  It ends this week on September 22nd.

A Step In The Right Direction

Sorry this is late.  I was on the road yesterday.

So Round 4 is drawing to a close.  I can hardly count the number of people who’ve told me “I totally failed this round” or “I’m not sure if I want to do Round 4…I was so bad at keeping up with stuff in Round 3.”

My question to those of you in this boat: Did you remember to adjust your goals when your initial one proved not to suit?  Did you take a single step toward whatever goal you set?  I’m betting MOST of you did.  And you know what?  That single step is one step further than you’d be if you had done nothing.  So it’s not a failure.  It might not be what you wanted to get done, but it’s something and that counts as progress.

This is something I know quite a bit about.  See, I am an uber planner–my agent refers to me as the Princess of Planning with much amusement.  I have a great many demands on my time, so I tend to be really regimented about a lot of things, scheduling this, that, or the other thing because if I don’t schedule it, it’s not likely to get done.  This tends to produce a To Do List of Everest proportions, and since I’m only human, it means there’s STILL an awful lot on that list that doesn’t get done when I want it.  I have a really bad habit of focusing on those 42 things that WEREN’T done instead of the 17 that were.  This is something I think a lot of us are really bad about.

Frankly, I think we all need to give ourselves a break (somebody remind me I said that the next time I’m freaking out).

I did NOT get what I wanted accomplished during this round.  I finished and released my debut YA, Red.  I wrote a bunch of blog posts and interviews for a blog tour.  And…that’s about it.  Which is still an accomplishment.  But I’d been hoping to knock out another novella by now.  Instead, it’s been 6 weeks since I’ve written anything at all.  I think I’m past the panic of that.  It is what it is, and it took longer to get the last book out of my head to clear the way for the next one.  If I had stopped fighting that, I might have been able to get more done.  But I have SUCH A HARD TIME allowing myself to…well, breathe.  To rest.  To recognize that sometimes not producing is still productive and part of refilling the creative well.

So I hope you will all take some time to do that for yourselves between now and the start of Round 4 on October 3rd.  Because this will be the LAST ROUND of ROW80 in 2011.  It will be the Round that takes us through the holiday season.  The Round that is a haven for all the NaNo Rejects.  The Round where YOU WILL GET STUFF DONE.    It is also the Round I am still looking for Sponsors for, so do dash me an email at kaitnolanwriter (at) gmail (dot) com if you’re interested.  There’s a link at the top of the page that details Sponsor Responsibilities.

Meanwhile, no matter how much you feel like you failed, stop looking at what you DIDN’T get done and actually write up your final check-in post to acknowledge what you DID DO.  We are all about the positive here at ROW80.  Never forget that.

7/10 Check-In

Y’all have been at it for a week.  How’s it going this Round?  Did you bite off more than you could chew?  Need to adjust?  Or are you just moving right along?  Let us know in your check in post and link it below.

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