Happy Sunday, friends! I’m currently feeling a touch under the weather, so it’s going to be a Josh Groban, tea, and fuzzy socks sort of morning for me. 🙂

I want to extend another welcome to the bloggers who are visiting from the SheWrites Blog Hop. It’s gotten bumped down a bit, but my official welcome message is here. I’m looking forward to getting to know you all! For those of you who haven’t checked it out yet, please do.  There are many of wonderful writers who have joined up.

I’m slowly trying to give this blog a bit more structure and life instead of only using it for ROW80 updates, so over the next few weeks you will see more posts on non-check-in days, covering a wider variety of topics.  I’m toying with the idea of book reviews, wee blurbs about the historical research that I’m doing, discussions of world-building (which is one of my favorite past-times), and maybe a post or two on how I’m using philosophy and sociological theory in my work.

I added my first “experimental post” yesterday — a few idle musings about love and romance in the Odyssey, one of my favorite works out of ancient Greek literature.  I’d love to hear any feedback that you may have!

Now then, onto my update:

The Life List Club: I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the ways that I can strive for a more balanced and healthy life, and so I am throwing my hat in the ring for the Life List Club. I’ve created a page for my list, which includes ten goals that I will pursue over the next year.  I’ll try and report in on these, maybe during my Wednesday check-ins.

Social Networking: I downloaded TweetDeck on Thursday!  I think I spent the first twelve hours just staring at it, because it is so very pretty.  I am now learning the ins and outs of hashtags, and twitter communities, and lots of other awesome stuff like that, and I am having an absolute ball chatting with people.

Relevant to this: the Pew Research Center has found that spending time on social networking sites actually leads to a strengthening of interpersonal bonds, and helps to foster trust in others.

Writing continues on.  I’ve been meeting (and, at times, exceeding) my goals over the past few days, which is awesome.  Strange Bedfellows is coming along quite well, and I’m basically forcing myself to throw down words for Path to the Peacock Throne.  I’m trying to lay down the overall skeleton for the final half of the book, and I am ignoring the perfectionist inside of me that keeps wailing that it isn’t absolutely perfect.  I’m also struggling to find my MC’s voice, so I’m doing lots of writing exercises in the 1st person… and wondering if the story might actually be better served as a 1st person tale, rather than 3rd person.

Today’s goal includes finally getting around to tell me no lies, the story that is starting to feel like the neglected middle child (yes, my stories have feelings). I’d like to have the first chapter laid out — just the action and the dialogue.  I’ll fill in the blanks with description and whatnot later.

Finally, the thesis is slowly taking form. My thesis advisor sent along a list of helpful suggestions and critiques yesterday, and she and I are meeting today to chat about my progress.  I think I am going to approach this draft the way I do my fictional work: put the words onto paper, finish the draft, and then sit back, review, and figure out how to make it amazing.

And that’s all from me!  I’m off to drink more tea and grade the rest of these papers before I have to dash off to meet my advisor. Enjoy the rest of the weekend, all!