"Hello!" I call into the abyss of my blog, hearing a thousand faint impressions of my voice echo mockingly back at me.
I know it's empty in here. I know there's been a void where witty blog posts should have been. I know that my promises to myself of blogging regularly and writing regularly now seem like traps I set up for myself, knowing that I would fail. I know these things, and I'm sorry.
But I'm back, returning triumphantly from the absolute avalanche of college preparations that I put off for that wild month of November. Turns out that finishing NaNo allowed a bunch of deadlines to pile up and, because I am the best procrastinator ever, I am just now finished slogging through them (seriously, I just applied to my last college YESTERDAY).
Now that that's all over with, guess what I'm back to doing in the new year? Writing. I bet none of you saw that coming.
Of course, it was a lot of fun to throw myself wholeheartedly into my writing and forget about all other worries for most of NaNo. I felt important, I felt intelligent, I felt like I was a true writer. But, of course, I am not a true writer yet; I can't sustain myself on my writing (the idea is laughable); I have a great myriad of other things to take care of. And because I need some kind of incentive to write regularly (as the past month has demonstrated), ROW80 seems to be the best fit for challenging myself to finish my novel while passing the rest of senior year.
ROW80 stands for A Round of Words in 80 Days; as its website espouses, ROW80 is "the writing challenge that knows you have a life." It allows you to pick a goal for the next 80 days (this round runs from January 7th to March 28th) and then merely suggests that you check in every couple days or so on the website with a link to a blog post, such as this, to keep you on track.
In addition to allowing more flexibility, the other upside of this challenge is that it forces me to, in addition to straight-up writing, craft a blog post about each check in at least once a week. Looks like you'll be seeing more of me this year!
My goal for ROW80 is to finish the first draft of my novel. That will put me right on track for finishing my capstone in time, and since it is probably going to be another 50K or so, it appears manageable without being too much of a burden.
So off I go, astronauts!
With much guilty love,
Abby
(In other news, I'm also back on Goodreads. You should check out my impeccable reading taste.)
