It’s that time.
That time when I re-commit to participating in the blogosphere. It seems to happen at least once a year
since that golden era when I blogged much more often. It’s June 2012, and here it is happening again.
While this post is about recommitting to blogging on a more
regular and meaningful basis, it’s also about setting some goals for this
summer. At the moment, I’m an
academic, and that means that much of my life revolves around the university
calendar. Tomorrow marks, at long
last, the first official day of summer vacation for me. My students will be turning in their
final projects and yes, I will have some small amount of grading to do in the
next couple of weeks, but there won’t be any daily prepping for classes, there
won’t be any teaching, there won’t be the daily drives to campus. At least, not until fall semester
arrives. Like most academics, I
have a long list of things that I want to accomplish this summer. Unlike most academics I know, though,
most of the items on my to-do list are wholly unrelated to academia. There are many reasons for this, and
perhaps in the course of blogging this summer, some of those reasons will leak
into my posts. For now, I want my
posts to focus on what I want to do and accomplish on a purely personal level. I have three main goals for the next
nine weeks of summer vacation—writing, reading, and finding an online
community.
Writing – At the
end of spring semester, I made the decision to write at least 1000 words each
day. I write fiction, usually
something that is suspenseful, and while some day it would be awesome to be
published, I mostly write to entertain myself, keep myself busy, and give
myself a creative outlet. With
only one class to teach during summer school, I scheduled my writing time first
thing in the morning, and I was more or less able to meet my goal each
day. Then June came along and
brought with it the beginning of CampNaNoWriMo—the summer version of National
Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November. November is practically an impossible time for me to
participate in NaNoWriMo because of my teaching commitments, so I have been
looking forward to the summer version for a few months. I’m halfway through June and have already
written a little over 45,000 words on my summer writing project. My goal is to finish this project (and
by finish I mean finish the first draft and type THE END) by the end of
June. Then, as July and August
unfold, I want to finish the first draft of the project I began in May.
Ultimately, I want for this summer to be a summer of writing
what I want to write. I have come
to realize that academic writing is likely not the kind of writing I really
want to do, and there’s nothing about it that fulfills me. I take pride in the fact that I completed
my dissertation, and though it’s not the best dissertation, it is a finished
dissertation and I’m proud of it.
Still, I have discovered over the last year that not only do I not want
to produce academic writing, it’s also okay that that’s not what I want. What I want is to write fiction and if
I’m the only person who ever reads what I’ve written, I’m okay with that. I just want to write on a daily basis
this summer, meet my daily writing goal, and complete the drafts of two
works-in-progress.
Reading – Like
last summer, there are a ton of books on my summer reading list. To be honest, I’ll be happy if I can
read at least ten books over the next nine weeks. I have had an unusually difficult time finishing any book I
have started in the last couple of weeks.
The titles may or may not be part of my 2012 Reading Challenge where I
try to read as many novels from the Booker Prize shortlists from 2000-2011, but
whatever I read, I want to get back to posting a review on my blog. Reading is a big part of my life, and
it’s what made me decide to pursue a Ph.D. in literature so I want to find a
way to make what I read more meaningful to me. Exactly what I mean by that or how I am going to do that I’m
not sure, but perhaps I’ll have a better idea at the end of the summer.
Find an Online
Community – True confession: one of the sources of my unhappiness over the
last year is that I cannot find a community to be a part of. One of the reasons why I have looked
forward to CampNaNoWriMo is because I love the community of writers that burn
up twitter with tweets about their progress, their struggles and their
successes as they take on the insane challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30
days. Since the first of June it’s
occurred to me that perhaps what I need most right now is to find an online
community of writers to belong to, so this is one of my goals for summer as
well. I am planning to participate
in the third round of ROW80 which begins on July 2nd, so that’s one
alternative, but I think what I need to do is push myself out of my comfort
zone and visit multiple communities with the hope of finding the one that fits
me best. Maybe the watch word
(watch phrase?) for the summer is: stop being an introvert.
The thing that all three of these goals have in common—not
only am I trying to discover what I want out of the next phase of my life, but
I’m also trying to recover that passion that I’ve always had for writing and
reading. Somehow that passion has
been…diminished in the last few years.
Neither writing nor reading has ever stopped being important to me, but
they have stopped being more important than most other things in my life, and I
want to change that. I hope this
is a positive first step in doing exactly that.
