Probably my favorite book read this past year, though it's always hard to choose.

Here’s a quick recap of the book I read this past year, and those that I’m looking forward to reading this year. Only new reads listed (I’m a big rereader).

Top five favorite books of 2011 (in no particular order):

• Room, by Emma Donoghue
• My Happy Life, by Lydia Millet
• Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff
• Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson
• You Know When the Men Are Gone, by Siobhan Fallon

Five most disappointing books of the year (not necessarily ones I disliked but rather ones that I expected more from)

• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender (loved it, but the ending disappointed)
• People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (great premise, but short on character development)
• Cathedral, by Raymond Carter (I struggled to get through this one, honestly)
• The Next Queen of Heaven, by Gregory Maguire (just not that much to say about it, and overly quirky)
• Inheritance, by Christopher Paolini (too much introduced, not dealt with, cliched characters and situations, etc.) Read more »

Back in 2006, I started setting reading goals for myself. I was a year into my new major (professional writing after time as a natural science major, a chemical engineering major, then a microbiology major) and looking for ways to get my creative mind back on track. That year, I set myself a goal of 50 books and 15,000 pages. I met both goals, and I’ve been doing it every since (tweaking the numbers every year of course). But lately I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t do more. Not particularly for any big reason—mostly because I like making lists and checking off goals (hence my Day Zero project, then my 100 Days of Writing experiment).

I started looking for other challenges, to see if any sounded appealing. What I found (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), is that my particular brand of goal-setting neuroses is nothing compared to some people. There’s a book a day challenge (seriously, people have done this), a challenge to read books you “should have read in high school,” a challenge to read a book by authors whose names begin with each letter of the alphabet, and tons of others (Goodreads has a whole section for this). Then there are the writing goals: NaNoWriMo (and its many offshoots), the Inkygirl word count challenge, and the entire #writegoal group on Twitter.

Some of it seems a bit much to me (though I suppose I’m not really one to talk), but I’m also interested in the idea of having goals to push you along. Especially when those goals are of such a nature that you are responsible to no one but yourself for completing them (or not completing them, or lying about completing them, etc.). Does anyone else use goals for motivation and/or accountability? Does setting a goal affect your outcome? I know for me I’d read just as much without my Excel spreadsheet tracking every book, but the Day Zero and 100 Days of Writing stuff I did (am doing) really helped to amp up my productivity—something I believe I was fully capable of without the pre-set challenge, but that helped make it more fun in the meantime.

I made up a writing project thing a few months back that I like to call 100 Days of Writing. My goal is to write, more or less, for 100 days (betcha didn’t see that one coming). It’s really helped me get my discipline back post-thesis, and just last week I hit the 2/3 mark.

I’ve always been the type of writer (read: person) who procrastinates. I get my work done, but I tend to work best under pressure. So when I’ve got time to myself and I’ve got a choice between writing and, say, reorganizing the pantry, guess which I choose? (Seriously, not-writing helps me get a lot done.) But now I’ve got this daily deadline, as it were, which means that if I, say, decide to go to the bar before I’ve written, I’ll be staying up super late to get it done. It’s done wonders for my productivity.

But then this week some unexpected things happened. Wednesday I got un-laid off (maybe, sorta, kinda?). Thursday I got a phone call informing me that my dog immune system decided to attack his own blood cells and that he was effectively dying (he’s still at the vet’s). Saturday I had to redo my taxes because I realized I screwed up the first time, and I spent the entire day in a (totally stupid) panic that now the IRS is going to come after me. Basically, it’s been one big emotional roller coaster, and my up-til-now elevated level of just-do-it-ness has plummeted drastically. I find that I pretty much just want to sit on the couch and play video games do nothing. And I can’t help feeling that it’s times like this that separate the real writers from the wannabes, and I’m afraid I’m falling on the wrong side of this stupid little dichotomy I’m setting up in my head. But life does happen, and we must write through it. Read more »

Last week my semi-NaNo-related question to you all dealt with how you measured a good day of writing. There I was, optimistically looking forward to another month of, as NaNoWriMo would have you believe, literary abandon. Never mind that my job leaves me feeling devoid of all writing desire when I come home right now. Never mind that, after more than nine weeks, I’m still sick with some crazy mystery illness and spending way more time in bed than is normal. And never mind that I knew November 2 involved a 850-page book release that I’ve been looking forward to for a year.

So coming into today, Day 7 of NaNo 2010, I had somewhere around 300 words. The helpful word count tool informed me that, at this pace, I’d have 50,000 words sometime around 2013. And clearly, for those of you that were aware of my self-proclaimed goal to worry less about the word count than about getting back into the habit of writing daily…well, clearly that wasn’t going too well either. This is the point where, in my first year, I dropped out, due to the Ridiculously Out of Reach Goal (hereafter to be known as RooRG).

But why is it that 50,000 words in 30 days is less of a RooRG than, say, 49,700 in 23 days? (Or, for my second-year pals in Spokane, 80 pages of publishable quality in a year, which, I promise you, though it may feel like a RooRG at times, you’ll get there.) When I sat down to write this morning I told myself to take it one word at a time, but after a few hours, I remembered that words have a funny way of not adding up all that quickly. (Oh, and that 12-double spaced pages feels like I accomplished a lot more than almost 2 days worth of NaNo output.)

Still, there were moments where, against all of my carefully honed NaNo instinct (but in perfect tune with my newly-crafted, MFA-honed, not-speed-racer writerly instinct), I found myself going back at times and take out extraneous language. Because I really didn’t need that that, or that adverb, or that dialogue tag.

So here’s my question for you for the beginning of week two: When your writing goal seems ridiculously out of reach do you tweak the goal to fit the writing or do you tweak your writing to fit the goal? This year I’m doing a bit of both.*

*Yes, I know I cheat and answer “both” to the question every week. I write the questions, I can do whatever I want.

One of my goals is to see meerkats. I love meerkats.

I’m preparing to start the Day Zero project soon, and it’s had me really thinking about my goals. For those of you who have never heard of this before, it’s challenge to complete 101 preset goals in 1001 days—that’s about three months shy of three years, and amounts to a goal being completed every ten days. Some people listed on the site clearly haven’t taken these numbers into account and fill their lists with a compilation of goals that might be difficult to complete in thirty years, but I digress. (Also, coming up with 101 realistic goals is way harder than you’d think.)

What’s particularly interesting to me is how many people have artsy type goals. (You can browse the lists here.) A lot of people want to write books—though I suppose that probably doesn’t surprise most writers, since once we announce we are writers, friends and family (and strangers) start popping out of the woodwork with the books they are writing, or want to write. Personally, I think this is awesome—the more people that see value in the written word the better—but I’m sure many “real” writers would disagree with me.

After writing, lots of people are setting reading goals. These, however, often make me sad. One girl whose list I just looked at set a goal to read ten books. Ten. In 33 months. Still, hypothetically speaking, maybe she only reads two books a year now, in which case this is actually a good thing. Personally, my yearly reading goal (and I’m a total nerd and track my reading in a specially designed Excel spreadsheet) is 52 books and somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 pages. Read more »