Drumroll, please! The final tally:

82 / 80 poems

and

14355 / 15000 words

I started ROW80 with a higher word count (20,000), but I revised this goal to 15,000 after Week 3 when it became apparent that I wouldn’t be blogging for the duration of the challenge.

This round, I learned several things. One of which: blogging & using Twitter don’t help to me achieve writing goals. They rather insidiously suck up time; I would write off a few hours spent on Twitter in the evening as “research” or “responses.” I’d respond and respond, and not get any poems written. Giving up Twitter isn’t an option. Professional contacts are important to a writer (and a designer). Friends gather on Twitter, and it’s nice to blow off some steam on a particularly hard afternoon. What I will do from now on is no longer include social media / response goals in my writing challenges. It’s all too easy for me to neglect the important stuff in favor of the “research”. A side-effect of this new resolution: I will also no longer include blogging in my word count totals, unless the blogs are creative, publishable pieces (essays, short fiction, poems, etc). Work blogs, and status updates, portfolio updating…all of that is business or pleasure… the stuff around the writing rather than the writing itself.

The project fared well. I made good strides towards writing the rough draft of my next book. I finished 82 poems, and I can now see the shape of the project. I need at least double that amount of poems to flesh out the narrative arc of the poems’ speakers. In reading a few of these poems back, I can see how inelegantly they are written. It will no doubt take a herculean effort to revise them.

My final realization was that despite my no longer updating ROW80 progress on this blog, participating in the event still gives me structure. Despite my quietness during ROW Round 3, I have not given up on the challenge. To that end, I believe that I will participate in either Round 4 or Round 1 of 2013. Though I may be as quiet as ever, I am still pulling with the rest of my fellow ROWers and I am there with you in spirit.

I hope your challenge was satisfying, and that you can look back on your goals and see how far you’ve come in the past 12 weeks. Good luck to you all!

Read more…

So! I started this week with a bit of a gentle slide into my ROW goals. To prepare for the weeks of serious writing ahead of me, I’ve been even more reclusive than normal (to those who don’t know, I am a crazy hermit! Hello!). Shunning instant messaging and family gatherings alike, I managed to recharge from a hectic scramble of projects in May & June. My goals for this round of ROW80 are similar as to what they’ve been in the past: write poems, write blog posts, do creative things in between. It’s a reductive set of goals, given my expansive desire to design and draw and write another manuscript in Round 1. But “laser focus” is my watch-phrase this round.

I usually write off the first week of ROW as my “gear-up” week, wherein I put into place routines and incentives to smooth my writing path (though it looks like I am staring at Twitter) and/or desperately attempt to make up those vitally lost days later in the challenge by heroically writing dozens of second-rate haiku. This week, however, I actually managed to make something!
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Hello, and Hello! It’s been a while, Dusty Journal. Business took me by surprise in March. Some kerfluffle with with routines (trying desperately to build one) and hospitals (being a patient in one) kept me away these past months. Pardon me while I air your curtains; they’ve taken on the air of a complacent poet. In the intervening time when I was not strapped to a gurney, I launched my spiffy new portfolio site and started taking commissions for graphic design work.

With the new month comes a new round of ROW80, the third round of the year, and by coincidence, my third round participating. For those of you unfamiliar with A Round of Words in 80 Days (or ROW80), it is a writing contest where you set your own goals, writing or otherwise, for the next 80 days. Participants check in by blog once or twice weekly on check-in days (Wednesdays and Sundays), and share their progress (and their encouragement) with fellow ROWers on the site’s linky list.

I last participated in Round 1 of ROW with some rather shaky progress. My goals were disorganized (writing….and drawing! and, and, and goal setting! and time-tracking!!1); my health was crumbling (though nothing like what it became in late March). I did manage to proof, edit, and release my second collection of poetry Manifesto For All. But with the book nearly finished at the end of 2011, the wrap-up took a tremendously long time.

In the past, I’ve talked about hows, the whys, and the wheretofores of my productivity. I am a graphic design freelancer; it is vitally important that I know my creative process in and out, so that I can carve a portion of that time out for writing. In January, I declared that I had no idea when I was at my creative peak. That’s easy to answer now. Mornings from 6am to 8am, with an extra burst of productivity from 10am to 2pm. Afternoons and evenings are completely bust. I’ve discovered how I can track my creative time (tiny boxes on a page), and how I can schedule work (make a list! lists are amazing!)

So what’s in store for this round? Focused goals. A laser-guided lock on writing (and finishing) a set of poems for my next book of poems.

That translates into three simple goals:

1) Write 100 poems or 20,000 words–whichever goal I hit first.

2) At least ten “modules” of creative time during the week (painting, drawing, design, etc).

3) 1 blog post per week, and at least 3 responses to fellow ROWers progress reports.

So that’s it! I will take the rest of the first week to plan out the contours of my poetry project, write an update that explains the ins and out of the project for Sunday, and schedule commissions for the rest of the month. I will be updating progress on Sundays. To all of you–ROWers, writers and artists–I wish you good luck and good health!