Holy Cowbell, My First Round 3 Check-in!! #ROW80

Round 3 of ROW80 started on July 2nd and this is my very first check-in! I feel so behind.

For all you newbies, ROW80 stands for A Round of Words in 80 Days. It’s when a bunch of crazy writers get together and encourage each other to chase dreams and achieve goals. It gets kind of wild.

If you want to know more, click here.

I was on vacation up in the Pacific Northwest (Orcas Island to be exact) when the Round 3 hooplah began so I missed the confetti and the naked table dancing.

What??! That was a different party? Whoops.

Anyway, I haven’t officially stated my goals yet so I’ll do that here.

Jenny’s Goals for Round 3:

• Complete Candace Havens’ July 7th Fast Draft course.
• Finish the first draft of my pregnancy memoir and submit it to my critique group.
• Write a minimum of 1K/day on my fiction and non-fiction WIPs the entire round.
• Learn how to make gluten-free bread.
• Read 1 craft book this round.
• Encourage at least 2 new ROW80 writers each Sunday.

That might seem like a tiny little list to you, but those are some huge goals to me. Candy’s class is making stellar page totals for a lot of my fellow Fast Draft attendees, which is always fun to see.

That being said, I’m struggling.

I’m getting in my 1,000 words a day (which is a hell of a lot more than I used to do on my WIP) but I haven’t broken double-digits in one day yet. I’m working on exercising my “glass half full” muscle and being happy for the 4-5 pages a day I’m getting, but I’ll admit I’m fighting a major case of Word Count Jealousy toward those who are cranking out 5K/day. I’m happy for them – I just want lots of beautiful words too.

Perhaps it’s because I was on vacation when we started, or maybe I didn’t plan well enough…but I think my angst is coming from a different place: I just completed a practice Fast Draft session in June that was very  active and PERSONAL.

I find the personal connection very motivating.

Candace (understandably) keeps things business-like so she doesn’t have 60+ writers sending personal messages. We had only 13 people in our Practice Fast Draft, and we were on a private loop, so we really  spent time rooting for one another.

I noticed that I pushed harder when I didn’t feel so anonymous. I’m working on it though.

I believe in the Fast Draft method, but I think the Revision portion of this class is going to be much more important for me this round than the churning out of pages (I’ve already accepted that I’m going to have to do this again next month). I have a lot of writing in a lot of places and it’s going to be a huge leap ahead for the memoir to get it organized.

So, I’ll keep at it because I WILL finish this memoir before the end of the ROW80 round. Frankly, I’m shooting for the end of summer.

In case you need a little levity after all that seriousness…

I saw this following picture on Renee Schuls-Jacobson‘s Facebook page that made me laugh and feel appalled at the same time:

To give you a hint why I felt appalled, my first three words were “whore,” “bad” and “fab.”

How are your goals going? What’s working so far, and what are you struggling with? Have you clicked here to encourage your ROW80 teammates? If you did the word search, what were your  three words??

Happy Sunday to you, whatever you’re working on!

Jenny