Weekly Writing Check-in: Sept. 7 to 13

There's no denying it. It's September again. The trees behind my building are hard at work already, metamorphosing. Which means it's also time for me to get back into the swing of things.

It's been quite some time since I even thought about doing a weekly round-up, let alone started each day looking over my accountability chart to see what I wanted to accomplish for the day (and the week? Forget it!) The great thing about September? It's like a clean slate. As much as one tries to cling desperately to those lazy days of Summer, it's kind of nice to get back into a routine. So, instead of simply whiling my days away daydreaming, I'll take a page of out of Cate's book and procrastinate productively.

Works-in-progress:

– Planning my Nano project: it's going to be a doozy (more on this in a later post)

– A few other pieces that I cannot seem to let go of, regardless of whether they will turn into something worth reading or not (did I mention I'm stubborn?)

What I did well (this past week):

– Just completed a piece which is currently sitting in the inboxes of my beta readers ~cringe~ Please don't hate it!

– Realized that I really do need to get back into a routine or I'll never make any progress

– Behind-the-scenes: tweaking the main section of my website, hoping to launch the changes in the next few weeks

What I can Improve on:

– as mentioned above, getting back to daily & weekly schedules

– read more!

– create more specific goals (such as "finish a story every two weeks" as opposed to "when it's done, it's done")

Publications:

– Even though the news came a few weeks ago, I haven't posted it here yet: received an acceptance for my story, The Lockwood Collection! It will be included in The Scroll of Anubis Anthology from Library of Horror Press. Thanks to Ben, Gary & Ryan for their advice and critiques

My Goals For The Coming Weeks/Months

– brainstorm more ideas for Nano

– Outline my Nano '09 project and document my process here on the ol' blog for the other book geeks who get a kick out of that sort of thing

– start thinking about my 2010 goals (which I plan to get into come December, when my brain will be mush from Nano madness)

– try not to drive myself completely insane trying to balance Nano and the seemingly endless stream of fantastic calls and anthologies that are announced on a weekly basis

So – how did you do last week? And what are you doing this week to kick your creativity into high-gear?

[NWC]