Wild Wednesday: #ROW80 Midweek Check In

I started out my day by getting lost in Detroit and ended my day at a fundraiser.  My Wednesdays are usually not this exciting!  Ah well!  I did make it to my meeting for work.  That actually went well.  Thank goodness for the little stuff of life!

Hubby, kiddo, and I went to an “Empty Bowl” fundraiser tonight, sponsored by Active Faith.  Soup and bread were donated by restaurants and bakeries in the area, and students from the local schools made the cutest bowls to give away.  Fantastic food!  My belly is still sloshing!  He! He!  I think the stuffed baked potato soup was my favorite, but only by a tiny margin.  🙂

This is the first time I’ve been to this particular fundraiser, but it won’t be the last.  I love encouraging creativity.  Every child in the community made a bowl from grades 5-12, for this event.  How cool is that?!?!  Huge turn out!  Hopefully, they were able to raise a LOT of money.

*We did NOT eat our soup from the handmade bowls!  LOL

Now for my writing updates:

ROW 80 is a friendly group that’s there to help writers focus on their writing goals.  Each writer decides what they would like to accomplish in the next 80 days.  We check in on Sundays and Wednesdays with their “linky tool” and are welcome to adjust our goals as we need to.  If you’re late getting started, that’s OK.  Round 1 lasts from January 2, 2012 through March 22, 2012.

WOW!!!  I’m having a great start to my writing week!  So…I had an ephiphany last week.  I’m splitting up Book One into two books.  So far, that’s been going really well.  It just wasn’t practical to allow the first book to grow as large as it had.  It would have been between 40-50 chapters long!  Yikes!  That’s WAY longer than I wanted!!!  🙂  Two books is much saner.

Microsoft Sam and I went through the first 18 chapters.  I found a couple of typos, but so far, those chapters are going to remain just the way they are in Book One.  That’s 82,892 words.  Not too shabby!  The next few chapters are going to be my  “Pull apart chapters.”  I’ll have to go over what’s what, and figure out which book they’re going into, but I’m optimistic.  Dare I say it?  I’m FINALLY seeing light at the end of my wordy tunnel!  🙂

I started using a new bit of FREE software this week.  I like it a lot!  Kait Nolan, from Row 80, had some really helpful links on her personal blog.   There was a program called yWriter5 that she recommended.  Why couldn’t I have heard about this program sooner?  Now, it’s not going to replace Microsoft Word, but if you’re dealing with an ensemble cast of characters, it sure does it do a nice  job of organizing them!  Organizational skills are NOT a strong skill of mine, neither is technology, but I actually understand this program!  Woo hoo!

Have a great week!

Juli