Writing Goals - Tracy Krauss

This month we were encouraged to blog about our current writing goals. I'm all for goal setting, but I think one has to be realistic about this 'writing gig'. My overarching goal is to write full time. Whether this takes place sooner (as in the next year or two) or later (when I retire from teaching) depends on a lot of different factors. I've heard from some very reliable sources that it isn't easy to make a living as a writer. In fact, even some authors that have managed to gain a fair bit of notoriety and success in terms of book sales still need to continue to 'work' at something else. It doesn't mean it can't be done, but a realist isn't going to quit their day job to pursue their writing career.

Fortunately, I do have some other options. As a teacher, I can always supplement my writing income as a TOC (Teacher on call a.k.a substitute) if I ever choose to spend more time writing and less time teaching. As well, my children are grown and my husband has a good job, so in a few years time we might consider the possibility of downsizing so that I could spend more time on my writing. These are big 'what ifs' however, and only time will tell if these options become a reality.

In the mean time, I have several other writing goals that are easier to attain and that have results that can actually be monitored.At the beginning of 2011 I set a few goals for myself that I am happy to say I have reached. One was to acquire an agent. Up to that point I had been 'agentless', and although I have two books in print and one more coming out at the end of this month, there is still a certain negative stigma attached to a writer without an agent. After pursuing several leads and sending out queries, I gained the interest of agent Steve Hutson of 'Wordwise Media' and signed a contract in September for my manuscript WIND OVER MARSHDALE. Hooray!

Another goal for the year was to increase my blog following to 200 by end of the year. (I started the year with about 60.) Again, I'm pleased that I reached that goal a few months ago. Perhaps I'll try to double it again by the end of next year. Of course there have been lots of other general 'promotional' goals, like increasing my Facebook fanpage likes, and trying to utilize other social networking better, but one person can only do so much, right?

Another goal which I am rather excited about was finishing a series of paintings for an illustrated children's book that I want to get published. This is a personal project based on a song my mother used to sing. I started the paintings about three years ago, but then stalled out on finishing them. (I had about half of them done and then lost my enthusiasm for the project ...) I took up brush and paints again this summer and finished the rest. I now have seventeen 16"x20" acrylic paintings to use as the illustrations for the book, ready and waiting for whenever I get the money to complete the project. (Or find an outside publisher who is interested.)

Finally, I joined the NaNoWriMo challenge again this year, with the goal of writing a 50,000 word manuscript from scratch during the month of November. So far I'm on track. I'm about half way there and this is the halfway mark in the month, but I've got a long way to go.

I think it's a good idea to have some very specific goals (finding an agent; increase blog following to a certain number) with an actual timeline attached. These kept me on track for this year when I might have given up. On the other hand, broader goals are also necessary. They are the stuff of dreams, and as writers, I think we all have a bit of the dreamer in us ...

What are your goals and how have you attained them?

Remembrance Day Thoughts - T. L. Wiens

I watched my friend, a WWII vet live on the battlefield years after the war was over. The too real nightmares never left him and his life never got beyond the horrors of the battlefield. He was a mechanic and worked on the tanks. He told me that usually when a problem arose, it was bodies stuck in the tracks jamming things up. He had to pull them out to get the thing working again. This time of the year, we're told to remember those who gave their lives. My friend me aware there are many living dead--men and women that never moved beyond the war and what they experienced.

How sad to have done the job and won the freedom for your country and never truly experience the joy.

I'll write the appies - Violet Nesdoly

I'll write the appies

Though I have laboured long

over the hot stove of fiction

slow-roasted the plot

peeled and cooked the characters

tossed point-of-view and dialogue

whisked lumps out of theme and motivation

and at last presented my creation

garnished to be page-turning

I prefer to work

on the poetry course

try to make each hors d’oeuvres

a playful experiment

every bite-sized creation

so surprising and intriguing

the reader can never stop at one.

Then I get to leave the kitchen early

because I’m done.

© 2011 by Violet Nesdoly

*************

With much of the writing world involved in NaNoWriMo, I decided to join in the writing frenzy, but in a different way. I have challenged myself to write one poem a day each day of November.

To help me do that, I refer often to the various poetry prompt sites I have bookmarked. The inspiration for "I'll write the appies" (my poem for November 4th) came from this prompt on poet Adele Kenny's blog The Music In It.

I'm posting an assortment of my November efforts here—so come on by, if you like, to sample some more canapés. 

- By Violet Nesdoly

Writing and incarnational discovery–Stephen T Berg

We live in a violent world. That's hardly a secret. We have been formed by a culture of war and violence, the nature of which we often keep wilfully hidden from ourselves. But today, we intentionally remember war, so that we can in some way dispel it, so that at least violence of a global scale, can be named and thwarted. And we hope that in the naming, in the remembering, something like grace and peace may appear.

And yet, as Flannery O'Connor has said, "Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them." And so in O'Connor's fiction, violence and the grotesque act as the cudgel to awaken the sleeping (that's us) to the reality of something like an intrusion of grace.

Of course violence is never the cause of grace, but it can, in its great distortions of social solidarity and communal life, reflect back to us our own propensity toward envy and rivalry, and in this uncovering, perhaps allow us the grace of seeing ourselves as we truly are—which is, if it happens, an occasion of mercy.

A writerly goal I repeatedly come short of, which is never less a goal, is to stay awake to those intrusions of grace and occasions of mercy, and so perhaps to seize them. For as long as there is language, as Bonny Way and Kathleen Gibson have outlined below, there is a desire to get at that meaning through honest reflection and a need to communicate it clearly. And the closer we can come to the nub and nut of things through true communication, the more set in relief grace becomes. And the closer the personal reflection, the more universal the meaning. For that, after all, is the nature of our Incarnate world, which the nature of violence attempts to usurp.

I have a notion that as Christian writers, writing for this kind of—if I can call it—Incarnational discovery, is at the bottom of most of our goals. For if it isn't, I suppose we're simply adding to the heap of informative tracts and very little to the meaning of things.

Of course as lofty or flighty as this sounds, it's only through the "habit of art," (Maritain) that we come to apprehend and then relay these meanings. For as we writers sit down to write out some vague and fleeting idea, we are immediately thrown into the practical question of form. And its through the daily habit of wrestling with this most basic aspect of writing where a discovery is made, a true thing found.

And as O'Connor has said somewhere, writers ought to be able to discover something from their writing, if not, there's little chance the reader will.

www.growmercy.org