Last Quarter Check In

I paid my quarterly taxes.  I've updated my spreadsheets. The air is cool and the leaves are turning.  So, it must be time for me to do my quarterly check-in.  You can see my updated Write Club chart on the left.  You'll notice some things are already done.

I finished submitting work to agents in August. It helped that I changed this title.  It started as submit Wish You Were Here to agents, but since that project is more literary than commercial, I decided to go ahead and submit some picture books and my mid-grade novel to agents to see what kind of response I'd get.  I also submitted some picture books to publishers.  In total, I've now submitted to nearly thirty agents and publishers, well above my goal of twenty.

Not surprisingly, then, my rejection goal is also complete.  This goal was a late add in, but I love the idea of celebrating rejections, so I wanted to track them.  Tracking rejections has inspired me to submit more work, go figure.  Since August, when I added this tracking to my list, I've submitted nearly 100 poems to journals and anthologies.  That's more than I sent the other six months of the year. I've gotten some lovely rejections and some acceptances already.

This morning, I finished my blog post a week goal.  NaNoWriMo is coming up soon, and I'm spending the month of October planing and outlining.  In November and December, I'll spend almost five weeks travelling for my other job, so I scheduled all my Writing Prompt Wednesday Posts.  I've got some fun pictures and prompts coming up in the next few months. I hope you'll stop by for inspiration every Wednesday.

I read my 1,000th picture book just a little while ago, so I've checked off that goal, too.

I'm on track to write a picture book a month for the next three months.  I have a long list of ideas, so I don't think that goal will cause me any problems.

That leaves three more: Christine, Poem a Day, and Year of Writing Dangerously.

Obviously, I won't complete Poem a Day this year.  But I've written many poems this year, and I'll continue to do so.  This month, I'm working on short poems (14 lines or less).  Next month, I'm working on children's poetry.  I've learned so much from this challange and though it wouldn't work for everyone, it's pushed me to explore new things with poetry.   If I weren't writing so often it might take me years to begin to explore some of the new things I've learned.  And 192 poems out of 277 days isn't bad.

I'll write more about Christine in a later post, as I'm still working through the resistance I've had to finishing this work.

The 365,000 words goal is easier to deal with.  I've been writing low word count projects this year.  I finished Wish You Were Here, I've written many poems and blog posts, I've written ten picture books so far and have a huge list of inspiration that will keep me writing well into next year.  I've completed a lot of work this year, but that hasn't equalled a lot of words.  I imagine I'll write at least 100,000 by the end of November, but the word count goal looks like another goal I won't meet this year.  And I'm okay with that.  Really. I've written 73,000 new words this year, even though this is the first year I've tracked my word counts, I'm pretty sure that's more than I'd written by this time last year.

What I really wanted was a way to quantify and make measurable the goals I have for my writing life.  I tell my husband all the time that he's got it easy in his job--other people generally give him tasks or ideas to work on.  All my work is work I assign myself, tracking goals helps make that work more measurable and helps me learn what's realistic for me.

I'm working on a creativity coaching class with Eric Maisel, and it's interesting to find that other people don't like the kind of measurable goals that I set for myself.  For some people, this type of goal setting leads to resistance.  But I've learned to appreciate setting and tracking specific goals, and when I find I'm resisting a goal, it gives me a place in my psyche and my processes to explore, so I can learn how to set more effective goals next year.

I'm already thinking about next year's focus.  After two and a half years of working towards a poem a day, that seems more like a daily practice now that I won't need to track.  I feel better if I take an hour or three to work on my poetry everyday.  I don't think I need a goal for that anymore.  I'll let my thoughts continue to percolate through the next few months as I decide what I need to do next year to push this writing career a little farther.

I hope you'll be thinking about your goals, too.  About what kind of goals work for you. About what matters to you.  About your life as a writer.  I look forward to hearing what you discover.


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Ta Da!

I posted this to our One Thousand Picture book group on Facebook, but it occured to me that this information might be helpful to many writers needing to find wise guides for their work.  Obviously, if you're writing longer works, the time constraints and numbers will be different, but these approaches work whether you're deciding what to read or reading through large numbers of books. 

1.  Author studies.  I found authors who were writing in areas I was interested in and ordered every single one of their books from the library.  Heck, if you do an author study of Jane Yolen, you'll be able to read about half the requirement.  This month, I've immersed myself in Jonah Winter, Dianna Hutts Aston, and Laura Purdie Salas. 

2.  New book and library display intervals.  I went to the library and pulled all the books I hadn't read off the new shelves and all the books I hadn't read that were faced out (twenty at a time) and sat down at one of the short little tables to read and add them to my Goodreads list.  I chose some to check out for further study, and then (because I love my librarians) returned the books to the proper places on the shelves. I brought my librarians cookies today to celebrate my 1,000th picture book.

3.  Bookstore power hour.  I did this twice during the past year, once in the early summer and today.  I went to Barnes and Noble and pulled books (ten at a time) from the shelves, logged on to my Goodreads with their network, and read until the hour was up.  Today, in that hour (and a half, I couldn't stop), I read thirty-two books, enough to push me over the top.  I made notes about authors I might want to do a study of and gave stars to the books I thought merited 4 or 5 stars.  This is a great thing to do because the face outs are either new books, classics, or books that are selling well.  I put the books back where I found them when I'm done. I heard one of the booksellers say they had 256 boxes to unpack and display.  I've worked in bookstores, so I know they have enough to do without replacing the books read by obsessive picture book readers.  I thanked them when I left. And they thanked me for putting the books back neatly.

(Note: This is adapted from a post I made to the One Thousand Picture Books Challenge group on Facebook.)

Resource Sharing: Romelle Broas on Using Mentor Texts

I've read over 300 books so far in 2016.  These are some of my favorites that have 

become my mentor texts.  

Before I started on my ReFoReMo journey this month, I downloaded Romelle Broas’ carefully critical Mentor Text Worksheet from the ReFoReMo blog.  I didn't print it out, but it was so thoughtfully arranged, I saved it on my desktop and tucked it in my mental file—To Deal With Later.

Then as I read through the mentor texts, I fell in love with a few of them. I read and reread them, trying to figure out why I found them so compelling. They were books I wish I had written, books like the ones I wanted to write. 

So I opened the Broas’ worksheet and looked at it again.  Then, I made a little folder on my desktop, copied the PDF into a Word document that I could easily edit, and began filling in the worksheets for the twenty or so books that I’d already decided I wanted to study from the first week's reading. 

Broas’ talks about how to approach mentor texts (and how to use her worksheet) on a guest post in Carrie Charley Brown’s site, but Broas' blog is also a rich resource.  On Feb. 8, 2016 she posted a wonderful analysis of breaking the fourth wall in picture books.  I signed up for her blog updates.  I can’t wait to see what she’ll do next.