ROW80: Wrapping Up Round 3

With my mom in town and school starting back today, it’s been a busy few days since our last check-in. Mom and I have been out every day except for Wednesday, I’ve been doing a ton of driving for all of our adventuring, and I had a major case of the freak-outs yesterday, when I saw the syllabus for one of my classes (so many books and articles, I think my eyeballs will roll out of my head by December). I calmed myself down by remembering that this really isn’t anything new, but yikes, it was definitely a scary moment.

But onto fun things! Today marks the end of ROW80’s Round 3, and it is both an exhilarating and bittersweet feeling. Reflecting on Round 3, I’ve come to appreciate all the more the length and nature of this writing challenge. Having 80 days to work towards a set of goals, and being encouraged to be flexible with them if necessary, has been exactly what I’ve needed.

These were my initial goals for Round 3 (I actually had to look them up, because I changed them more than once, and forgot what the original ones were):

• Write an average of 500 words/day on any project.  This means that I’m doubling my Round 2 word count goal, which makes me slightly nervous, but we’ll see how it goes!  I found myself exceeding the original 250 words/day goal consistently, so I don’t think this increase will be too burdensome.
• Complete Act 2 of Path to the Peacock Throne, and resist the urge to do too much editing to Act 1.
• Move from brainstorming and world-building tell me no lies to working on the first draft.

I ended up exceeding the daily word count quite a bit when I tackled CampNaNo in August. While I didn’t complete Act 2 of PATH TO THE PEACOCK THRONE, I did write over 50k for TELL ME NO LIES, which was a feat in and of itself. I also wrote roughly 13K for STRANGE BEDFELLOWS, although I’ve placed that on the back-burner for the moment.

I had a few other goals for the summer, in particular finishing the 1st draft of my MA thesis. I haven’t finalized the draft, but I did manage to write over 12.5K, retool the theoretical framework, and outline the remainder of the “results” section. I was feeling a little down about not having everything finished and wrapped up. However, I ran into my advisor at the grocery store the other day (oh, the perils of going to school in a small town), who told me to “take my time” finalizing the project. Definitely lifts a little of the pressure off my shoulders, though I do have my own timeline (defending by December?) that I’d like to maintain.

So that’s Round 3! Lots of success, lots of challenges, and lots of surprises. The best part, though, are all of the wonderful people I have met along the way, and who have been an amazing source of support and inspiration. I’m looking forward to ROCKING THE ROW with all of you when Round 4 starts on October 3rd!

In the meantime, I’m off for a visit with my younger sister this weekend, and to have a bit more fun with my mom before she returns back home next Wednesday. After that, it’ll be back to the grind of studying, thesisizing, teaching, and hopefully squeezing in time to work on my WIPs. I haven’t actually written much of anything in the past two or three weeks, and it’s starting to make me feel a little crazy.

I have a few ideas for my Round 4 goals, and I as I’ll be taking Kristen Lamb’s “Blogging to Build Your Brand” class, I’m sure some of these goals will include retooling and refining my blog. I also need to figure out which project I’m going to tackle for November’s NaNoWriMo, but I’ll be chatting more about this once October rolls around.

That’s all for now, ROW80 friends (you can find everyone here).  Hope to see you all on October 3rd!