A Successful Round

Around noon today, I got home from the writers’ retreat I was at since Thursday. It was an amazing time. Maybe I didn’t get all of my goals for the weekend accomplished, but I grew into a better place in my writing calling. I will expound on that in each of my goals below.

As always, green highlight is goal accomplished, yellow highlight is goal at least worked on, red lettering is goal not even attempted.

A. WRITING

1. Finish another edit of my novel, “The Truth Beyond the River.” YEAH! I finished it Saturday afternoon and still cried when I got to that pivotal sentence on the second to the last page. Thank you, again, to Beth Camp for being my beta reader and making all those wonderful suggestions on the manuscript.    

2. Continue tweaking my book proposal / query, as needed for each literary agent I intend to contact next. I worked a lot on the query and on the proposal this weekend. Kathy, the facilitator of this retreat, was of invaluable assistance with it. I still have a lot more work to do. Then, yesterday, I started thinking that with the way the publishing industry is, maybe I should really consider total self-publishing. Sure, there is so much work to doing that, a lot of cost up front and no guarantee of ever breaking even. But at least my books would get published in a timely fashion, and my time would be spent on something that would come to fruition, instead of chasing something that might never happen. I would have much more control of what my books look like and when they are released. Yes, I know there is a lot of headache in self-publishing, especially if a writer wants to do it correctly, but it may be worth it. 

3. Write nine chapters on my next novel, which I am giving the working title of “New Old Spies.”  I only wrote a chapter and a half, but I’m happy with that. The characters are starting to talk to me and tell me their stories, so I think it will start to flow better now.

4. Write two inspirational pieces for the page-a-day calendar at my work.  I wrote two.  

5. Write two posts per week for my other blog, “The Dino Chronicles”. I only posted once this week, but that was because I didn’t have internet at this camp. I did write three, though, which is clearly what this goal states. Hmm? I was going to do yellow, but I guess I can make it green.

B. REACHING

1. Send proposals / queries to the next agents on my list.  See #2 above.  

2. Submit the two inspirational pieces to my work calendar.  I submitted the two that I wrote.    

3. Promote myself or a piece of my writing (whether it be promoting one of my books, submitting a piece somewhere, saying something brilliant about my writing on my social media, etc.) once a week. The publisher of my first three books is offering them for free this weekend, so I posted that to each of my social media. This weekend I also garnered some ideas for things I can post to promote my writing and the importance of continuing to grow my social media. Oh, and I also did sell five books while I was there.    

C. READING

1. Read the daily assignment in “Today’s Light” Study Bible. Oops, haven’t been keeping up while I was at this retreat, which is shame-on-me considering this was a Christian event. 
2. Read the daily devotion in “Jesus Calling”. Yes.

3. Read five other people’s blog posts per week and comment on two of them. I read three and only commented on one.       

4. Finish reading three books. I’ve read two and am a third done with the third. I am such a slow reader, I really need to pick up the pace.           

D. REMAINING

1. Physical

a. Increase my water intake, averaging 60 ounces per day. I’ve been trying.   

b. Lose five pounds and three inches around my waist. Nope, I have to say this goal is a fail and will definitely not be on my next list of goals.

c. Exercise four mornings a week and three evenings a week. I only worked out three mornings and two evenings. It’s hard for me to work out when I’m not at home with my own stuff.  

2. Home fires

a. Scan 100 of the old pictures I have around the house. I’ve scanned 123 pictures.

b. Wash all of my house’s windows. Nope, but we did finish painting the living room.    

c. Do a major cleaning of one of my closets. Nope, but I’m giving that painting of the living room a second green here, coz that was a ridiculous amount of work.  

d. Host my brother-in-law’s wedding at my house on August 4. This should have stars and fireworks next to it!   

3. Tumaini Volunteers

a. Write the Policy and Procedure manual. Finally worked on it during the meeting last weekend. Since it will always be a work in progress, I’m giving this goal a green. Also, walking around the Camp where the retreat was this weekend, I thought wouldn’t it be cool to have a retreat for the Tumaini Board? Go away one weekend and spend the whole time banging out all our details, do some bonding over it, maybe even just some alone time. I messaged three of our board members and they agree it is something to consider.   

b. Host two merchandise sales. We had one the first Saturday in August, but we have also sold over a hundred dollars’ worth of stuff at a store in town, so I’m calling this goal met!  

c. Do a thorough inventory of our current merchandise. Yes, yeah!

d. Apply for grants. Not yet, we are going to hold off on this for now, hoping to get enough in donations.   

e. Raise enough money ($5,000) to start the first segment of the community center. Let’s be optimistic. We raised $585 in July, another $350 in August and I’m not sure how much yet this month, with over $6,000 in assets. At the meeting last weekend, we only came up with one idea for raising money yet this fall, but I think I’m going to start really pushing it on social media for the next few months and see what happens.   

I think this Round of ROW80 ends in a few days, so this will be my last post until next month. I am content with how my goals came out – there is a lot of green up  there and just that smear of red, which was a totally unrealistic goal anyway.

Are you happy where your goals ended up this Round? Do you know what changes you will make for the next Round?

One last thing – if you came upon this Blog post from elsewhere, ROW80 stands for Round of Words in 80 Days and is the writing challenge which knows you have a life. You can read more about it here.

Where I did a bit of my writing this past weekend. Unfortunately, the sunny weather and clear blue lake outside my window (in the picture above) kept me from sitting in this chair much of the time.