Tuesday, May 25, 2010

By my next birthday, I will be more organized

What a wild and kahrazy birthday weekend!

Here are just a few elements it included, in no particular order.
  • Chocolate spice cake with whipped cream
  • Dancing at the Little Red Hen
  • Teaching two classes at Finding Your Readers in the 21st Century
  • Cleaning the kitchen floor on hands and knees
  • Eating a most delcious "French Dip" sandwich made of field roast at the Georgetown Liquor Company
  • Getting handcrafted birthday cards from my niece and nephew to "Ant Becky"
  • Strolling around the festive Ballard farmer's market
I also went to to two excellent classes at Finding Your Readers in the 21st Century and learned a lot. For example:
  • I give up way too easily with submitting my work. In  the class taught by Priscilla Long, she said she submitted 300 times last year. (Out of those 300 submissions, she got 11 publications).
  •  In the other class, teacher Wendy Call said she submitted her work 100 times.
  • Priscilla l suggested keeping an extensive inventory of everything you've ever written. She pointed out that very productive, famous artists have a habit of doing this, and that it's a way of "respecting" your own work.
  • Wendy tracks all her time down to the last minute and has very concrete writing goals that she sets at the beginning of each year.
  • She plans how she will meet these goals through every month of the year and spends 90 minutes every week just prioritizing to make sure she's on track with those goals.
 Phew. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I learned, essentially, that I could be way more organized than I am. Of course I knew that already but it was nice to get some really concrete tips as to how to do it.

And now...on to the "earning a living" portion of my day.



1 comment:

teahouse said...

Yes, keeping a catalog of what you write is very useful. It also helsp you keep track of what you've created for copyright purposes, in case anyone ever tries to steal what you wrote and/or claim that they wrote it first.