2013 Writing Mindfully

Josephine Wall Painting the Dawn

Last year, my year of writing deliberately fell apart and I lost that sense of wonder, sense of joy for writing. I've given it quite a bit of thought to why this was so and decided that 2013 will be the year of Writing Mindfully. I will embrace the ebb and flow of my creativity and let my imagination take flight. I will study and contemplate, write and explore, find the joy in creating and editing, and not limit myself.

My goals for 2013

To help with writing mindfully, I will be using Bonnie Neubauer's The Write Brain Workbook: 366 Exercises to liberate your writing to exercise my writing muscles. 

Instead of a daily quota for my novel writing word count, I'm going to follow James Scott Bell's advice and establish a weekly word count of 3500 words. Since I hand write everything, on average I usually end up writing 2 full pages at one sitting which is approximately 1000.   Invariably I only end up writing 4 or 5 days out of the week so having a weekly word count makes much more sense.

Continuing my personal pursuit of  my DYI MFA,I plan on reading and studying the following books:

The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christoper Vogler
Character, Emotion and Viewpoint by Nancy Kress
Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell
Art of War for Writers by James Scott Bell
Echoing Silence:  Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing by Thomas Merton

Along with reading The Writer's Journey, I plan on taking Mythic Structures courses offered online through Writer's Village University  and probably will take the F2K creative writing course again. 


Continue to develop and complete the first draft of Green Cross utilizing K.M. Weiland's suggestions in Outlining Your Novel.



Finish editing and polishing Eye in the Ashes and send out for beta reading.

I will be joining A Round of Words in 80 Days again in order to help me establish daily and weekly goals and have some accountability.