It’s summer, and time for a new Round of Words in 80 Days
Last round, I tried submitting a short story every week. I did great at first, then it fell apart. The end of the school year just has too many weird scheduling things going on.
My laptop is also acting funky, but that’s because it’s several years old now and bogged down with too much stuff. I’ve begun to make some changes in organization, such as not saving every single image I put on the blog. We can probably squeeze out the money for a new one sometime this summer, and then I’ll need to really re-organize everything. Once upon a time I had a folder titled “Writing” that I simply copied each time I switched machines. I still have that folder, but now it’s more like a library with so much stuff on it; several complete rough drafts of novels and many short stories as well as the outlines, inspirational images, spreadsheets and even a database that go along with them all.
This round, part of what I’ll be doing is re-thinking the way I keep my writing organized. I’m looking forward to the fall when I will finally have both children in school full time! We recently had a minor crises with childcare, but I think in the end the change is actually a huge benefit, not a loss. It’s letting us do some serious rearranging of the type and timing of the care we use. (My older daughter has special needs and requires extra care.) To take advantage of the time when my kids are in school, I want to be well prepared with all the little details (like where to save and back-up my files) in order.
So… the goals…
Each week I will identify and complete a task related to re-organizing my writing life, with the needs of a long-term career as the focus.
Each week I will do something for other writers, whether that is editing for a friend or just making some encouraging comments on other blogs.
Each week I will write at least 2k. This is way down from what my usual is… in the past 2k was my daily goal, not the weekly. But this round is about preparing for a career I will enjoy for the rest of my life, building on the last two and a half years which I’ve spent finding my way, learning a lot, and seeing the first few of my stories published. I need to get the organizational stuff done so that in the fall I can dive in without having the leftover stuff hanging over me.
Question for my writing peers: how much time do you spend doing writing-related stuff that is not actual writing?
AmyBeth Inverness 
Hi AmyBeth! Welcome to Round 3!
I loved doing weekly goals before in past rounds. It’s such a flexible way to ROW80… which, is kinda the root of the whole thing anyway, right?
Manageable goals is always the way to go. And being flexible with them, too. I have a tendency to set my goals way too high at the start of every round and adjust accordingly.
As far as to your question, I usually spend quite a bit of time doing writing-related stuff that’s not actually writing. For one, I’m part of a roleplaying site where I run plot for others (kind of like being a Dungeon Master in Dungeons and Dragons, if you’ve ever played). That takes up a lot of my time. And it is TECHNICALLY writing; it just isn’t writing my novel. I also read a lot of writing-related non-fiction and tweet inspiring things to writers when I’ve got some free time. The #writing, #amwriting, #mywana, #wordcount, and #ROW80 tags tend to have a lot of good tweets in there if you dig around a little!
And then, of course, I’m sponsoring ROW80 this Round.
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Wow. That’s actually a lot of non-writing. Uh, excuse me while I go draft a scene or something.
Part of a writer’s life is doing “writing related” stuff. A *lot* of stuff. One of the biggest misconceptions new writers have to get past is that writers mainly sit at a desk and put words to paper for hours every day. Not so. Many multi-published authors I know only get an hour or two of actual writing time in each day.