I've been thinking

I have been thinking about how I do my blog. It is essentially about how I use writing to hold my life together - hence the title of the blog, creative glue. But I also want to focus more on the craft of writing: what methods I use, everything from the essential hammer and nails of my craft to the minute details. I want to post more details that might be useful to other writers. I am still figuring out how I would be able to accomplish that. I still want to use it as a means of accountability as well - post when I have been doing well with my writing goals and when I have flubbed, and analyze why I may have flubbed. I think seeing my efforts documented like that is helpful to me, and may be helpful to other writers as well - accountability to the goals you set is a major part of accomplishing what you set out to do in writing. In the writer's group I attend, I got a LOT of feedback on Thursday. I had people apologizing for tearing my work up one side and down the other. I was not offended, though. I knew that what I had brought in needed a lot of work. I was excited to have a new perspective and to see what I could do to make it work better. Humility goes a long way when you are revising and getting feedback on your work. That is hard to do because your work is your baby, and you have the innate desire to shelter and protect it. But it cannot get strong if you defend it all the time instead of letting it grow. I was being mature this week, and taking the criticism from my fellow writers, plotting to make good use of it. I am getting excited about NaNoWriMo. It will start in November. (For those of you who haven't got a clue what that is, see www.nanowrimo.org) This will be my third year participating in NaNoWriMo. I have the ideas planned out for what I will write, and it is mostly a matter of doing the arithmetic to see how many words I need to write per day to make the goal of fifty thousand words by the end of November, taking into account the days I will not get the chance to write. I guess that gets to count as my method mentioned for today - set specific goals for your writing so you aren't just floundering. My usual goal is to get at least a thousand words written per day on the novel. I find it works better for me to do it in five hundred word spurts rather than trying to conquer it all at once. If I get more than a thousand, more power to me. If I get just the thousand, I have still made a lot of progress. Specific goals are something that help me make progress.