Every month we gather here to discuss what we’ve achieved and commit to making more progress in our creative lives in the coming month. We call it our Serious Writer’s Accountability Group or SWAGr, for short! (We’re serious, not sombre!)
Leave a comment below telling us how you got on last month, and what you plan to do next month, then check back in on the first of each month, to see how everyone’s doing.
(It doesn’t have to be fiction. Feel free to use this group to push you in whatever creative direction you need.)
Did you live up to your commitment from last month? Don’t remember what you promised to do? Check out the comments from last month.
And don’t forget to celebrate with/encourage your fellow SWAGr-ers on their progress!
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Examples of Goals Set By SWAGr-ers in previous months
- Write a story a day in May – everyone!
- Revise at least 10 short stories – Iraide
- Write two short stories. – Jami
- Attend one writers’ conference – Julie
- Write fable for WordFactory competition – Sonya
- Re-read the backstory pieces I wrote in May and see if I can use them within my novel – Monique
- Research the market – Jami
- Focus on my serial – Maureen
So, what will you accomplish this month? Leave your comment below (use the drop-down option to subscribe to the comments and receive lovely, encouraging notifications from fellow StADa SWAGr-ers!)
(Next check-in, 1st of the month. Tell your friends. )
Don’t forget, if you need inspiration for a story you can still get ALL THE PROMPTS from StoryADay May 2016 and support the running of the StoryADay challenge at the same time. (I’m really proud of this year’s collection!) Give a little, get a little 
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I’m perpetually guilty of setting goals that are too high so I’m being mindful of the fact that the holiday season is coming up and the day job is in its busiest period of the year. My next project is a novella, Swan, which is an epilogue for my historical fantasy series. For December, I’d like to get this plotted out and make a start on the first draft. I’m defining “make a start” as any words written that are not part of the planning.
Kylie! Welcome to StoryADay!
I’m looking forward to seeing where you go with that epilogue. Of course, I have to read the series before I can read the epilogue, so you have a little time, from my perspective 😉
You can define ‘making a start’ any way you want, of course, but don’t forget Lisa Cron’s mantra that all that planning “IS the writing”. (A useful mantra only if you get depressed about “wasting time” on the planning, I suppose.)
Don’t forget to come back on Jan 1 (or thereabouts) and let us know how it went.
So my goals last month were mainly just ‘NaNoWriMo’, which… I did not finish for the first time! My life was very, very disrupted, so I only wrote about 30k. On the plus side, I’m pretty happy with that 30k and I have a much better idea of the story now. I’m letting it rest for a bit because I have some shorter projects to work on, but I’ll be returning to it.
During December, I’m going to:
– write my rather-up-against-the-deadline fic for Yuletide, a rare fandoms fanfiction exchange
– finish writing and polishing ‘featherweight’, a short story I’m going to try and submit to Apex while they’re open for this brief period
– put in a bit more work on ‘be kind please rewind, my horror story that’s gone thru several reinventions
– write some poems for a small winter collection I’m putting together, ‘I Am The Krampus’
Sorry to hear November was disrupted, but I definitely feel your pain. I had high hopes for NaNoWriMo too, but got derailed. The good news is that, like you, I have a story that I think has potential, but needs more planning.
Good luck with the Apex submission. That’d be a good one to snag.
I love the idea of the winter poetry collection. Have fun with that!
Hi Julie, I’m afraid I’ve been absent the last few months due to various difficulties, but I’ve managed to write two more first draft chapters of my novel and I’m now past halfway. I want to complete the first draft early in the new year, hopefully another chapter this month. I submitted a short story (a revamp of an earlier story) a few months ago to a competition, but I had the Dear Malcolm email last week. There are one or two other short story competitions I’ve noted early in the New Year that I would like to write new stories for, in the next couple of months.
Hi Malcolm! Glad to hear you’re trucking alone. I hope the difficulties get out of your way for the next few months, at least!
Good job on the novel. It’s so easy to get impatient with ourselves, but when you look back over the year/month it’s good to see that forward progress.
And I’m glad you’re at least putting yourself in the position to get the “Dear Malcolm” letters. Never give up, never surrender, as a wise man once said…
Maybe that should be the StoryADay motto for next year!
Didn’t write but one story, but it was selected to run in the December issue of Downtown Los Angeles Life Magazine.
For December, I hope to revise as many as 20 of my frontier/western stories for my first fiction collection.
Nice, Joe! That’s a pretty impressive write:publish ratio 😉
Good luck with those revisions!
OK, I’ll start.
Hmm, I didn’t set proper goals for last month because I knew I was traveling for two of the three weeks. I did set the goal of winning NaNoWriMo and while I started a new novel I flamed out spectacularly. But it’s all good, because I needed to do a lot more prep for the story I wanted to write. Now I’m going to set myself a new deadline for that.
I did, however, attend the Writer Unboxed UnConference (at some point I will have to stop and count the many ways in which it was AWESOME!) and write an article for Writer’s Digest Magazine (w00t!!!), which was quite a lot of work, as well as slipping away for a week of relaxation-and-stomping-around-theme-parks with my family (with bonus inspiration video post – look at that mad grin. Can you tell I was having fun?). I also recorded a podcast or two.
For December:
* Finish a short mystery novel 45,000 words by mid January, which means having the story broken out and about half of it written this month.
* Record 1-2 more podcasts
* Write four blog posts for StoryADay
* Lots of critique reading and commenting
* Read ten short stories (You can see my picks here)