I Love a Good Word War!

I'm difficult when it comes to goals.  Externally imposed goals make me feel trapped and smothered and I like to ignore them.  Internally imposed goals seem meaningless, and I accidentally ignore them.  The only way I've found to set goals is to find an externally imposed deadline that I choose to impose on myself.  A little competition goes a long way here.  Things like NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy are favorites for this, but I'd like to write more than two months of the year and I really like to be able to work on something for more than one month.  This is where word war comes in.  You get a group of writers, set a time and write like mad until the time's up!  Whoever has the most words at the end wins.

Word wars are common for NaNoWriMo.  You can find one running pretty much any time you want to write during November.  But I've just recently found a group that does one once a week, on Wednesday.  This seems about just right for me.  Writing every day won't happen, I've got too many other things to do, but every Wednesday?  That I can do!  I'm looking forward to some very productive writing time from here on.  It's already helped me get out a very stuck portion of my Shadebearer novel.

Being Involved in Being an Author

This year I've been taking steps to be not a person that writes, but an author.  I've chosen a pen name (Lanea is too hard to spell or pronounce), gotten an official looking picture taken of myself, and set up a twitter account where I follow people other than my family.  I did all this in the hopes that if I made myself a professional presence online, it would inspire me to be more professional with things like my writing schedule.  Instead, I've found that following these authors has given me a sense of belonging I never got from artists.  I'm also learning that there's really no one way to be productive and professional with a writing schedule.  As long as you love it and work hard, you should be good.  I've found some people who do weekly word wars.  I'm getting some interesting information about what it's like to be on tour or wait for your book to come out in print.  I'm laughing and loving the very human and very interesting people who write the books I read.

All this is just from twitter.  What could a blog do?  This is what I intend to find out!  It won't be easy for me, I'm opinionated, but I also love lurking.  Still, I know some interesting things and I'm willing to give it a go.  I'm excited for the journey.  I hope to meet some fun people willing to take it with me.