Quotable Week: ROW80 & #writemotivation Updates

I found some quotes this week to illustrate my writing progress.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. 

Ray Bradbury

I've been a bit drunk on life this week. Earlier in the week, I had to have a spot of basal cell carcinoma taken off my arm. The stitches were really bothering me, and long sessions of typing weren't going well. I outlined some chapters and took some notes. But it's not so easy to calculate that into wordcount.

This weekend we are having some family fun in Charlotte, North Carolina with my husband's brother and family. I've brought out the laptop to do this post, but then it's going away again. I promised the kids. (Okay, I admit it... it's a holiday weekend, and I want to have some fun, too.)

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. 

Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

As I was taking notes, more thoughts would come. Thankfully the stitches were in my left arm, so I could write all I wanted. Kicking it old school. It's just hard to hurl words onto paper, because I couldn't keep up. I have a lot of chicken scratch to decipher. And the stitches don't come out for another week.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. 

Vladimir Nabakov

The pages on my WIP haven't seen any new words, but I'm feeling the story. I don't want it to escape, so I'll sit down on Tuesday and type until my arm falls off.

The rest of the A Round of Words in 80 Days (ROW80) update:

Reading: Finished a book on the drive down to Charlotte. My first Sarah Dessen book. Loved it! Reminded me so much of the Judy Blume books I read as a teenager. Now, I'm reading Michael J. Fox's book, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist. Already I can tell I need to focus much more on the positive in my day to day life.

Blogging: Daily here and 3x on Mom in Love with Fiction. In case you missed it, I talked about a real-life lesson on self-published authors versus traditional ones this week. Check it out. My experience made me feel so fortunate to be a writer.

Editing: Did some on the car ride down. The sore arm didn't help with editing, since I do it all on the computer.

Exercise: Still running a minimum of 3x a week. Just making sure I have lots of sunscreen on. A bit of a slide on the sugar intake. Something about long car trips makes avoiding Snickers bars near to impossible.

#writemotivation Update

1. Write a minimum of five days a week for a total of 2,500 words on my works in progress.
Hours of writing. Didn't attempt to count the words (see saga above).

2. Get current novel, Depression Cookies, up on Smashwords by month's end.Ran into some formatting difficulties. So bummed. Still hoping to have it up soon. It's looking like June. What started as sadness, turned to irritation, and now it's slowly boiling to angry. I don't like to be angry. *insert calming breaths here*

3. Read a book every 10 days, plus at least one craft book in the month of May.Finished a book in one car trip, and one-third done with another. Ahead of goal.

Hope everyone is enjoying the holiday weekend!