#FirstDraft120 Day 97: Check in for SWAT Day! (New Year, Revised Goals) | #amwriting
It’s Friday! And that means I want to know about your full writing week. What were your greatest successes during the week? What was your favorite line/bit that you wrote? What did you learn about yourself, your characters, and/or your story during the week’s work? What are you most proud of yourself for doing this week when it came to your writing? What are you proud of yourself for accomplishing?
In the business world, there’s a planning model called SWOT—which is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Around here, we’re going to use SWAT, but we’re going to do it differently, so check in with the following recap for your week:
- Self-Evaluation (how do you think you did? what can/do you want to do differently next week? what did you learn about yourself as a person or as a writer? what didn’t you do or finish that you wanted to? etc.)
- Word count (total for the week, Tuesday through today)
- Awesome Accomplishments (breakthroughs, discoveries, highest daily word-count ever, etc.)
- Tidbits to share—something you wrote that’s just too good not to share or that struck you as funny or whatever.
If you don’t want to share this stuff publicly, that’s okay. You can add a section to your Story Bible or start a journal (or add this to your existing journal) to keep track of this. But don’t skip doing this—I think that in the future, when you look back either on what you accomplished during this challenge or (heaven forbid) why you gave up on it, the insights you’ll gather later with hindsight on your thoughts during the challenge will be invaluable.
Happy writing!
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KayeDacus.com 
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I’ve definitely gotten out of the habit of doing something writing related (or even thinking about doing it) every day by slacking off for the past month and a half. But now that the holidays are over and I’ll be heading back home to Nashville tomorrow (after an extended visit with my parents so I could have some repair/maintenance work done on my car), I’ve got to make my goal of 1+ hour of writing-related work daily one of my highest priorities in 2017.
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I didn’t get started with my 1-hour goal on Monday—I let myself continue to slack off and spent the day watching football and getting caught up on most of the blogs/sites that I follow (too many—I need to cut way back on these, because going through the list of stuff I subscribe to through Feedly can take several hours every day).
Tuesday: I did a 1k1hr timed session from 4:30 to about 6 p.m., so I hit my hour goal Yay!
Wednesday: I got into OneNote and my old Story Ideas folders on the computer and refamiliarized myself with some of the stuff I’ve come up with in the past.
Thursday: My new laptop arrived! But as with all new devices, it spent about four or five hours downloading and installing software updates (as well as the programs I had to install, like Office and Corel Photo Pro). So since it was THORsday, I grabbed a notebook and worked between bouts of finding/downloading software.
Friday: My new computer is almost finished downloading all of my 25+ years’ worth of documents (almost 80 GB—but that includes tons of graphics/graphic-laden files). So tonight, I feel like the best way to break it in is to do some writing-related work for at least an hour, right? 😉
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I guess I’d have to say that my awesome-est of awesome accomplishments this week is that I actually did writing-related work every day this week (since Tuesday, anyway), unlike the past five or six weeks. It’s an awesome start to the year!
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Since I’m not working on one particular story, here are some of the story bullet points from that Karl Urban/Joss Stone idea in my Story Idea OneNote image above:
1901
–Heroine is a middle child of a large gentry family in rural England (Wales?).
–She grew up on a farm—but even though she grudgingly learned the skills necessary to become a good farm wife, she spent all the rest of her time practicing her music with a dream of becoming an actress/singer. This has been quite a battle with her father, since she is now in her early 30s. He gave her a year to try pursuing the stage professionally, so long as she agrees to give it up and accept his direction and do what he tells her (when she fails, he believes) at the end of that year.
–Certain she’d make it into a starring role on London’s West End within the year, she is shocked 365 days later to find herself on a ship bound for New Zealand and marriage to a complete stranger.
–Hero’s family were some of the first European settlers in NZ in the 19th century, establishing a massive sheep farm/wool business by the 1840s.
–Thousands of acres of pastureland for raising sheep and horses.
–Extremely wealthy.
–His father took out an ad in a posh London magazine for a bride for his son.
–Hero doesn’t know anything about it until his father sends him into Auckland to pick up “a delivery” at the dock—and it turns out to be a woman.
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I have NO memory of coming up with this story idea, nor what sparked it/where it came from. So I’m really, really glad I wrote it down a couple of years ago!
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